UP THE AMAZON TO BRITISH GUIANA
It would have been foolish to have sailed directly home from Pará, now
that there remained only one unexplored corner of South America.
Besides, it was fourteen months since I had done any real wandering, and
to have returned at once to civilization from the easy experience of my
Kinetophone days might have left me with as great a longing for the
untrodden wilds and the open road as when I had set out three and a half
years before. I am not merely one of those whose chief desire in life is
to go somewhere else, but I have a horror of going by the ordinary
route. There was one way home which no one seemed to have followed, one
which even Brazilians considered impossible; and the first leg of that
journey was to push on up the Amazon to Manaos.
On the morning of May first, therefore, having added six hundred grains
of quinine and a roll of cotton bandages to my equipment, I boarded a
_gaiola_, or “bird-cage,” as river steamers are known in Amazonia, and
struck south. The journey could have been made direct by ocean liner in
less than half the time, and these flimsy native craft not only charge
the same fare, but sell tickets as if they were conferring a special and
individual favor; but they wander in and out of the river byways and
give glimpses of Amazonian life which passengers on the big steamers
never suspect. The _Andirá_ was perhaps a hundred feet long, its two
decks heaped and littered with boxes, bales, casks, trunks, and huge
glass demijohns incased in rattan, until one could barely squeeze and
scramble one’s way along them. On the open deck aft stood a long
dining-table flanked by wooden benches, while ten small, stuffy
four-berth cabins stretched along either side of the boat close to the
boilers. These, of course, were merely dressing-rooms and places to stow
one’s baggage, for everyone slept on deck. After a very Brazilian
dinner, with the big jolly captain, of pure Portuguese ancestry, at the
head of the table in the family manner, there was a scramble for places
to tie hammocks, and the space ordinarily allotted being all too small,
the entire after deck, except the table itself, was soon festooned with
a network of redes in all colors.
“_Todo é à vontade, senhores_,” said the captain, “_Aqui nada está
prohibido. A casa é nossa: nem uma saia á bordo_;” and with nothing
prohibited and not a “skirt” on board we fell quickly into pajamas and
slippers, from which most of the passengers did not change again during
the trip. Behind us, without background, Pará lay flat across her yellow
water, only her reservoir and the twin towers of the cathedral standing
a bit above the general level, ugly with ships and warehouses, in the
foreground, scores of the vessels rusting away because rubber had lost
its spring. Slowly it receded to a line on the horizon dividing a
light-blue from a light-yellow infinity, then faded away into
nothingness.
Even this smaller mouth of the river was very wide. The mainland on the
left was already growing indistinct, yet on the right the Island of
Marajó was only a distant faint line. As we drew nearer, this, too,
seemed covered with dense forests as far as the eye could see, with many
slender palms which I took to be the _carnauba_, though they turned out
to be the _burity_. Toward three o’clock we put in at a port on the
island, a bucolic, peaceful cove with a cool-looking two-story
farmhouse, a group of cleanly white women and children gazing down from
the deep shade of the upper veranda. Men in pajamas and wooden
_tamancos_ wandered down to the boat, from which we, similarly clad,
strolled ashore. The lower story of the house was a well-stocked shop,
an iron gate shutting off the wide stairway to the balcony above, where
the women and children lived in almost Oriental seclusion. Beside it
stood a large _cachaza_-mill grinding up sugar-cane and turning it into
rum in 25-liter demijohns, more than a hundred of which were already on
the wharf, waiting to be carried aboard the _Andirá_. A group of
reddish-gray cattle with the suggestion of a hump were grazing in the
grassy yard beyond the distillery.
The Island of Marajó, several times larger than the British Isles, with
great plains stretching from horizon to horizon, has long been famous
for its cattle. Once they were so numerous that they were killed only
for their hides; then came an epidemic which nearly wiped them out.
Emperor Dom Pedro took a hand, made the island a breeding-place,
improved the stunted and decreasing native stock by the importation of
zebu bulls, and now the island was estimated to have forty thousand
head, furnishing meat to most of the Amazon Valley. The zebu in his
heavy hide, with its black, sun-proof lining, not only endures the
climate easily, but is indifferent to the _carrapatos_, or ticks, and
all the other insect plagues to which animals from the temperate zone
are subject; he eats any food, crosses with any species of cattle,
bequeathing all his good qualities with even a fraction of his blood,
furnishes both meat and milk of a fairly high grade, and as a
draft-animal is noted for his strength and endurance. The only great
_plaga_ left were the alligators, which every year kill much stock. When
the waters are low the cowboys of Marajó have “bees” of driving
alligators into shallow places, where they are dragged out by the tail,
unless they succeed in clinging to one another until the hunters’
strength is exhausted, and killed with axes. Water-buffaloes were also
once introduced, but they proved inferior and did not breed well with
cows. The pet of this particular estate was a magnificent zebu bull that
had come from India by way of England and Rio, at a cost of more than
$6,000, and which strolled about with the same dignified regal tread of
the sacred bulls of Puri and Benares to whom he was closely related. He
ate anything, according to the _fazendeiro_—sugar-cane, _melgaço_, or
crushed pulp, bread, _farinha_, soap, hats, clothing, shoes—but,
continued his fond owner, he had a lordly way of choosing only the best,
which again carried my mind back to long rows of East Indian shopkeepers
shivering with apprehension lest one of the holy animals wandering past
discover their most cherished wares.
The estate-owner was in close touch with the world and its doings and
had traveled widely in Europe, though not in Brazil. I could scarcely
maintain a seemly countenance when he told me in great detail, with much
eloquence and wealth of gestures, the story of Edison, almost word for
word as I had written it a few days before for the chief daily of Pará.
But gradually the conversation turned to politics, as it usually does
when men meet in Brazil, unless religion happens to get the right of
way. His heartfelt remarks about “this calamity of a government” showed
that he and his like were as fully aware of the knavery of their
politicians as any foreign observer; the trouble was, being talkers
rather than doers, they had no notion where to begin in an effort to
improve things.
At the first symptoms of night we pushed on up the reddish-yellow river.
I had already made it a practice to give myself an occasional hour of
exercise on the slightly curving roof of the steamer, and as there was
but slight room for walking, I indulged in a modified form of
calisthenics, to the unbounded astonishment of my fellow-passengers. The
Brazilians not only did not exercise, except with their tongues; they
did not even read, though there were excellent electric-lights over the
hammocks. Even the most nearly educated among them start out on a trip
of a month or more on one of these _gaiolas_ without a page of reading
matter. While they were wondering amusedly at my exercising I could not
but ask myself what on earth they did with their minds during those
weeks of forced inaction. They seemed to endure the voyage in a sort of
coma, sleeping audibly by day in their hammocks, though often making the
whole night hideous with their card games.
We stopped during the dark hours at a couple of _fazendas_ to pick up
sealed demijohns, and in the morning, a brilliant Sunday, entered the
Strait of Breves. This is a narrow and deep section of the river between
Marajó and the mainland, with endless dense forests, sometimes not more
than five hundred yards away, on either side, so winding that often the
exit was apparently closed ahead and one was at a loss to know how the
boat could proceed. The stream was so placid that the metallic
reflections were almost painful to the eyes, and so clear that the
virgin forest, from its slender little palm-trees to its liana-wound
giants, seemed to stand upright, in reversed positions, above and below
the surface, with not a suggestion of land visible. Tucked away here and
there in the edge of the water-rooted wilderness was a single house or
hut built of jungle materials and standing on stilts, with no apparent
soil, but only board-walks above the water. The dwellings were generally
new and fairly clean, as were the inhabitants in their newly-washed
Sunday clothes, at least from a distance. Now and then a compact little
island dense with forest jungle, lordly palms, and majestic trees with
great buttresses, slipped past. Natives in their _ubás_, long, slender,
dugout canoes sitting low in the water, glided along the roots of the
forest, often all but swamped in our wake, but always saving themselves
by skilful canoe-manship. Women and children were equally water-birds
and drove the steed of the Amazon as fearlessly and unerringly as the
men. They sat tailor-fashion on the very nose of the canoe, now and then
crossing the stream, plying their round or heart-shaped paddles—on some
of which were painted fantastic faces—in a languid yet energetic manner,
appearing always on the point of falling off, though to go overboard
anywhere in the Amazon is to risk being devoured by alligators,
_parainhas_, and a dozen other _bichos_. Woods, trees, _ubás_, houses,
even the women combing their hair inside them—for they generally had no
walls—showed exactly as plainly below the water as above, colors and
all, so absolutely mirror-smooth was the constantly curving strait. No
doubt after twenty-five years in an Amazonian pilot-house, as was the
case of our captain, all this would become deadly monotonous—the
endless, dark-green, impenetrable forest unrolling like a stage setting
on either side day after day and year after year, to doomsday and the
end of time—but at least the first trip on a brilliant day is a memory
not easily lost.
It is natural to see only a dreary sameness in the endless film
unrolling at a steady ten-mile pace on either hand, but in reality the
differences are infinite, the countless tree-forms alone the study of a
life-time. The uninitiated may journey for hours in these Amazonian
wildernesses without detecting a sign of animal life where every square
yard has its sharp-eyed denizens. Though food abounds everywhere, the
unschooled may starve in the midst of plenty, as the moss-covered bonds
and rotting bones of more than one escaped prisoner from the
rubber-fields have borne witness. Most astonishing of all, perhaps, to
the newcomer is the apparent absence of bird life—unless there still
lingers in his mind’s eye that terrifying picture of our school-day
geographies—a rope of monkeys swinging from a lofty branch, the
lowermost playfully tickling an alligator under the chin.
Early in the afternoon we slid up to an empty sheet-iron _barracão_, and
then wandered on again, the only reason for the stop evidently being
that the captain wished to buy a native straw hat, especially well made
in this region. The only ones on hand were too small for him, so he
ordered one for the down-trip some two months later. As long as the boat
was moving we were perfectly comfortable. In my steamer-chair under the
prow-awning I watched life slip lazily past, forgetting even that I was
suffering for lack of exercise. In the tropics a man seems to have as
much energy as elsewhere; but he is prone to form plans and when the
time comes to execute them to say to himself, “Oh, I think I’ll loaf
here in the shade another half hour,” and before he is aware of it
another wasted day is charged up opposite his meager credit column with
Father Time. Whenever we halted in a windless corner of the river to
take on demijohns or leave a few of the things which civilization
exchanges for them, the heat was intense. One was often reminded of the
fact that Pará is nearer New York than it is to Rio, for most of the
supplies of this Amazonian region seemed to come from “America,” as its
inhabitants call the United States. The people of the Amazon Valley, for
instance, where cows are few and generally tuberculous and children the
one unfailing crop, consume great quantities of American condensed milk.
We signed a “vale” for a milreis whenever we wanted milk with our
morning coffee, and were handed a small can of a very familiar brand.
Too lazy even to filter water through a cloth, we drank the native
yellow-brown Amazon, containing everything from mere silt to tiny
“jacarés” (alligators), as the Brazilians called them. Passengers, crew
and riverside inhabitants were equally easy-going and contented with
life. Neither the captain nor his _immediato_, a pleasing, well-mannered
man of Portuguese father and Indian mother, thought it necessary to
assume that fierce outward demeanor with which Anglo-Saxon commanders so
often seek to maintain authority. Ours was a family, a sort of
patriarchal rule which, in the end, seemed to bring as effectual results
as when nothing is left to individual judgment.
Pinsón went twenty leagues up the Amazon before he discovered that he
had left the ocean, if we are to believe old chroniclers. It is indeed
the “sea-river” or the “fresh sea,” as the Brazilians call it, for in
most places it broadens out until the endless tree-line takes on the
wavering blue of great distance. Day after day the pageant of
magnificent trees of many species, their trunks often totally hidden by
the dense smaller growth and the lianas that draped them as with winding
sheets, crawled ceaselessly northward, though at times it receded to the
dim horizon. Rain and dull skies seemed to have remained behind in Pará,
yet there was a vapid breath to this prolific creation, a superabundant
luxuriance about us, which made the daily consumption of quinine seem a
wise and foresighted precaution. Even in the hushing heat of noonday one
seemed to feel fever ramping up and down the land, throttling man even
as the vines and fungi sapped and choked the mammoth trees; by night,
when the vampires winged their velvety flight in and out of the shaded
depths from which came the incessant night sounds of the tropics,
mingled now and then with the gentle murmur of the great river, it was
as if Death himself were striding to and fro questing for victims.
On the third or fourth day we caught glimpses of low, wooded hills, or
ridges, and as these always give footing for _castanhas_ along the
Amazon, we were not surprised soon after to come upon sheet-iron
warehouses and huge heaps of “Brazil nuts.” The “Pará chestnut” grows on
a tree averaging more than a hundred feet in height—so high that it is
never climbed for its fruit—and clustering fairly well together on
slight tablelands on both sides of the Amazon. The nuts ripen during the
rainy season, from January to March, and fall to the ground by hundreds.
In its native state the “nigger-toe” is about the size and shape of a
husked cocoanut, but with a shell so hard that a loaded cart passing
over it will not crack it. Strangely enough, monkeys have a way of
breaking them open, as they have of picking them from the branches; but
puny and un-inventive man, at least of the Amazonian variety, not only
waits until the nut falls of itself, but requires the aid of tools to
open it. Broken with an ax or a hammer, each shell yields from twenty to
thirty nuts set tightly together like the segments of an orange. A man
of experience and average industry can harvest about three bushels of
“Brazil nuts” in a day. Many Amazonian families make a journey to the
_castanhaes_, or “chestnut-groves,” their annual _pándego_, or
“blow-out,” and though many die every year of an intermittent fever
called _sezões_, and immorality is rampant, whole villages, men, women,
and children, take to the hills to camp out during the “chestnut”
season, on the proceeds of which the survivors frequently live the rest
of the year. _Caboclos_ in palm-leaf hat, cotton trousers, and a piece
of shirt, were even then arriving at the warehouses with canoes level
full of the nuts, an empty basket set down into them to give room for
the paddler’s bare feet. Paddle and shovel are the same word in
Portuguese (_pá_), and to these dwellers on the Amazon the same
implement serves both purposes, for with the flat round paddle they
shovel the nuts into the basket when they have reached their
destination. The basketful is then dipped into the river and sloshed
about until the worthless nuts, being lighter, float away, and the rest,
well washed, are piled in heaps in the warehouse. Here they were worth
about 20$ a hundred kilograms, at war-time rate of exchange less than
five cents a quart. Wholesalers buy them from the warehouse-keepers, and
at least four fifths of them go to the United States. At home they are
not dry and sweet, as in the North, but taste not unlike a damp,
sweetish acorn, and native consumption is not so great as might be
expected.
One afternoon the captain came back on board with a _sapucaia_, a larger
and better kind of “Brazil nut” than the one we know. These are rarer
than the _castanha_ and grow on a more bushy and shady tree than the
tall, graceful, arm-waving _castanheiro_. Unlike the familiar species,
this one must be planted, the nut being merely thrown on top of the
ground near water; and the fruit should be picked, for if the nuts fall
out while the shell is still on the tree, that limb will not produce
again for years. All this extra work, added to its scarcity, makes the
_sapucaia_ unknown in foreign lands, though at home it sells for several
times as much as the common variety. The shell is about the size of a
squash, rather uneven and angular in shape, with a _tampa_, or
tight-fitting sort of trapdoor in the bottom, which opens when the nuts
are ripe and lets them fall to the ground. In each shell there are
thirty to fifty nuts, larger than the ordinary “Brazil nut” and shaped
like fresh dates. Inexperienced visitors to Amazonia often mistake the
_castanha de macaco_, or “monkey chestnut,” for the real article, though
it grows on the trunk rather than the branches and has no edible
qualities.
Once, soon after midnight, we took on board at Parainha a white woman
with a long stairway of children, yellow and sun-bleached country gawks,
the eyes of all of them running with open sores of what was probably
trachoma. They were going up the Juruá to the end of the _Andirá’s_ run,
near the Bolivian border, to begin life anew. The woman’s husband, a
Portuguese, had for years been manager of a large _seringal_, or
rubber-field, which he had made a very paying concern for the owner, who
lived in Pará, Rio, and Paris. Foolishly, the Portuguese, either
ignorant of or unattentive to Amazonian conditions, had let his wages
drift without drawing them, until he had more than twelve contos to his
credit. Then one day some workers on the _seringal_ came to the house
and said, in the matter-of-fact tone of the Amazon wilderness, “We are
going to kill you.” The manager asked permission to send away his wife
and children first, but the assassins did not think it worth the
trouble, so they shot him where he stood, with his family clustered
about him. Not one of my fellow-passengers seemed to have the least
doubt that the owner had instigated the murder, in order to get out of
paying the back salary. “Perhaps he had gambled himself into debt, or
had nothing more to spend on his French mistress,” they languidly
explained. The papers of Pará had reported the case and it was perfectly
well established, yet justice is so unknown up the Amazon that no one
had been arrested and the widow and orphans had finally been driven off
the _seringal_ by the owner himself, who had paid part of their fare up
the river to be rid of them. He continued to live as usual, with a new
manager, for such things are so common along the Amazon that no one
appeared to think twice about it, any more than of a man dying of fever
or snake-bite. To each new group of passengers, or to anyone who showed
interest in hearing it, the woman repeated the story over and over in
exactly the same words and gestures, after the manner of people of
sluggish intelligence, like a piece she had learned for public recital,
all in the same monotonous tone in which she might have spoken of the
failure of the mandioca crop. She was of too primitive a type to have
been able to decorate the story. Some one had advanced the equivalent of
nearly a thousand dollars to get the family up the river, where, no
doubt, they are still working it out as virtual slaves to some other
tyrant in Brazil’s national territory of Acre.
A contrasting type was our _seringueiro_, or owner of a rubber-field far
up in the interior. He wore a goatee and mustache, cotton trousers and
undershirt, the latter always open and disclosing his caveman chest; and
he was almost childlike in his gaiety, with constant jokes and puns,
whether winning or losing at cards. Yet beneath it all one could see
that he was full of tropical superstitions and above all of the lust for
money,—or, more exactly, the lusts which money will satisfy, for the
Brazilian is rarely a miser—and that he would rob, or hold in slavery,
or assassinate by his own hand or another’s, far up there in the unruled
wilderness where he was going, not only without compunction, but almost
without realizing that he was doing anything amiss.
At times the river opened out like a vast sea, and one wondered not how
we were to get through, but how we were to find our way. All the jungle
trees had wet feet, and every now and then pieces of forest or patches
of bushy wilderness came floating down the river, though I could make
out none of the _giboyas_ (boas), deadly serpents, or jaguars of popular
fiction riding upon them. Sometimes, in the refulgent western sun, the
procession of trees took on a sort of early-autumn tinge, as if winter
were leaving its accustomed track and was about to spread its blighting
trail across this ocean of vegetation. A fine day, like a great man,
dies a glorious death; a rainy one slumps off from dullness to darkness,
you know not when nor care, like the invalid grouch or the malefactor,
and on the whole you are glad that he is gone and that night has come.
Yet there was a certain lack of color in Amazonian sunsets. It was as if
nature had so many materials at her disposal that she was careless in
the use of them. One evening a big ocean liner, gleaming with lights,
slowly overhauled us and pushed on into the darkness beyond. Gnats
similar to those that had made life miserable during my tramp across
tropical Bolivia, and here called _puims_, gave us occasional annoyance,
though by no means as much as two “Turks” deeply marked with long Amazon
residence who persistently kept the most horrible of American
phonographs squawking far into the night. My chair and hammock were
forward, however, where it sometimes grew so cold in the wind that I had
to wrap the sides of my heavy Ceará hammock about me.
[Illustration: Ice on the equator. It is sent out from the factory in
Pará to the neighboring towns in schooners of varicolored sails, a
veritable fog rising from it under the equatorial sun]
[Illustration: Two Indians of the Island of Marajó, the one a native,
the other imported from India to improve the native stock]
[Illustration: A family dispute on the Amazon]
[Illustration: The captain and mate of our _gaiola_ were both Brazilians
of the north]
On such a cool, black night we halted at the old city of Santarem at the
mouth of the Tapajoz after midnight, so that no one went ashore. In the
morning we crossed the river and entered first the _paraná_ and then the
_igarapé_ of Alenquer. A _paraná_, in Amazonian parlance, is a narrow
arm or branch of a river which comes back into it again; an _igarapé_ is
a blind tributary, pond, pool, or lake. Here the narrow stream ran
between unbroken avenues of trees, among which one with an almost
snow-white leaf was conspicuous. Rarely was there a bluff or high bank,
but for the most part a deadly flatness, often with a reedy swamp in
front and densest jungle-forest behind. Ocean liners go direct from
Santarem to Obidos and never see this _igarapé_. We slid almost into the
dooryards of brown, half-naked families in the scarce mud huts along the
flooded way, startling them as we might have Adam and Eve about the time
of the apple episode, and at ten in the morning went ashore in Alenquer,
a typical small town of Amazonia.
There were perhaps a hundred buildings clustered together on a bank of
the narrow branch, everything as deadly still as only barefoot,
grass-grown towns can be, though the place was cleaner and more
comfortable than one would have expected up a little side-arm of the
Amazon in the sweltering wilderness. It carried the mind back to Santa
Cruz de la Sierra in the lowlands of Bolivia; there was the same forest
of cane chairs and settees in the wide-open houses, the same hammocks
tied in knots on the walls and soon to be spread again for the siesta,
the same atrocious pictures in hideous frames, the same garden-like
patios behind. Here, perhaps, there were more signs of comparative
wealth, though far more leaning on the elbows than work. The country
roundabout was partly flooded and the greenest of green, with some low,
wooded ridges in the near background. Cacao grows wild in the forest
about Alenquer.
I came upon an unusually good school building for a town of this size
and situation, with more signs of energy than in the cooler but more
negro parts of the country. Almost all the children had more or less
color, but it was more apt to be of Indian than of African origin.
School “kept” from 8 to 11:30, with none in the afternoon, “and even
from ten on we get little done in this climate,” according to the
principal. His assistants were all women, rather weak and unintelligent
looking for the most part, all with some Indian blood. This was a state
school with no municipal income, and “teachers are required to be
graduates of the normal in Pará, but we are rarely able to get any, so
we have to substitute.” The principal himself was the only one who
fulfilled the legal requirements. The fact that salaries had kept
dropping, until now they were less than half the 350$ a month they had
been two years before when rubber was high, with lower exchange and
higher prices, and that no one connected with the school had been paid
anything in twenty-eight months, may have had something to do with the
lack of candidates. The teachers made arrangements with the fathers of
families to keep body and soul together. Women and men received the same
pay—when there was any—“naturally,” said the principal, “seeing they
have to do the same work.” As in all Latin-America, the teaching was
mere tutoring, crude and primitive compared with the imported American
furniture. Boys and girls sat in separate rooms, and the entire roomful
rose in unison and gave the military salute when a visitor entered.
Otherwise there was the usual Latin-American lack of order and attention
and nothing could induce the teachers to resume their task as long as
the visitor remained. The summer vacation was from November 1 to January
15, but the principal complained that a large proportion of the pupils
were even then away, for many whole families migrate to the _castanhaes_
from February to April or May to pick up “Brazil nuts,” and the school
fills up again only in June or July. There is a state law requiring the
attendance of boys from six to fifteen and girls from six to twelve; but
law in Brazil, sighed the principal, is “largely made to laugh,” except
those parts of it that bring income to politicians, which are sternly
enforced. Compulsory attendance of female pupils was set low because
girls on the Amazon marry early. Mothers of twelve or thirteen are so
common as scarcely to attract attention. Among our passengers was a
bright young dentist from Ceará who had been born on his mother’s
twelfth birthday. He had fifteen brothers and sisters, all living, and
his mother, according to his statements and the photograph he carried,
was a comely woman of thirty-two in the prime of life, without a sign of
wrinkles or graying hair. In the interior of the Island of Marajó girls
often remain naked until puberty, the time of marriage, and there are
many jokes on the awkwardness of brides in their first clothes.
The captain had spent his boyhood in Alenquer, so we tarried some two
hours while he visited and had dinner with relatives and old friends.
The “Amazon River Steam Navigation Company,” to which the _Andirá_
belonged, was a British concern, with a federal and state subsidy and a
generally tangled ownership and management; but the captain had none of
the Anglo-Saxon vice of punctuality. Toward sunset that evening we
stopped at a huge pile of cordwood partly under water, in front of a
_fazenda_ house on stilts to be reached only in boats, where we could
have paddled right into the thatched servants’ quarters. But the
smallest boy or girl along the Amazon can handle a canoe with an ease
and grace suggesting that the _montaría_ has a mind and a will of its
own; and no one ever thinks of walking, even to the next-door
neighbor’s. In “summer” and non-flood time life is said to be pleasant
on the broad, open campos which were now reedy swamps. We remained
several hours, while the negro-_caboclo_ crew of half a dozen carried
the wood-pile aboard on their shoulders. Before the war these _gaiolas_
usually burned coal, but that had risen in price to the height of a
luxury. Some of the time it rained in torrents; the sky was heavy and
dark, and it grew distinctly chilly even in this sheltered corner. The
last sticks of wood were left in a hurry and with a whoop when a fine
_jararaca_ of the deadly white-tailed variety was found sleeping under
them.
About dawn we emerged from the _paraná_ upon the “sea-river” again, with
a horizon so broad that we could not make out its dirty-yellow end in
some directions. That afternoon, or the next, we halted before the
house, its yard flooded and backed by dense humid cacao-woods, of two
energetic young Portuguese. They were courteous fellows, though knowing
well how to drive a bargain, and had considerable education, as do many
settlers along the Amazon, where “doutores” in eyeglasses are often
found. The ambitious often come here to risk death and work for a quick
fortune, while the more languid drift through life in their safer
birthplaces. I tramped for an hour in the damp, singing silence and
heavy shade of the _cacaoaes_, everywhere damp underfoot and fetid with
decay. The cacao-pod, about six inches long and half as many across,
grows on the trunks and lower branches of its bushy dwarf tree, with a
very short stem. Slashed open, the pod yields about sixty seeds, which
are put into a long tube of woven palm-leaf, like that used by the
Indians to squeeze the poison out of the mandioca, which is suspended
and compressed by a weight attached to the end until all the pulp turns
into _vinho de cacao_, a white liquid not unpleasant to the taste and so
harmless that it might be sold even in our own model land. Then the
seeds are laid out to dry a week or two in the sun before being shipped
to Pará, and on to New York, where they are toasted and ground for our
cocoa and chocolate. The Portuguese brothers sold us two huge turtles
for our ship’s larder, as well as five pigs and ten chickens to be
resold higher up the river; but luckily, negotiations to buy some cattle
for the Manaos market fell through for that trip. There were said to be
unlimited “Brazil nuts” in this region, but it was so nearly sure death
from fever to spend a week in the _castanhaes_ that they were never
gathered. Death is a most commonplace and unexciting visitor all along
the Amazon. A friend comes on board, and in the course of a conversation
with the captain or some other old acquaintance says casually, “Oh, by
the way, my brother João died last Thursday. Do you think the cacao
harvest will be as large this year?” It is the same with the loss of
time. Speaking with a yawn of some place far up the river, the Amazon
traveler says idly, as he shuffles his cards, “_Num mez ’stou lá—ou
dois_—In a month I’ll be there—or two.”
It was eleven that night when we anchored before Obidos, where the
Amazon crowds itself four hundred meters deep between banks only a mile
apart, one of the few places in which one shore can be seen from the
other. The captain promised to give me a warning whistle, so I went
ashore. It was a checkerboard town of considerable size, built up the
slope of a ridge, and now, at midnight, a splendid example of what a
city of the dead would be,—the wide streets deep in grass, the houses
tight-closed, for the Brazilians are deathly afraid of air, even in this
climate, and not a sight or sound of a human being in all my walk about
the town. Horses, cows, and donkeys were grazing in the streets and on
the big grassy praça, however, thereby outwitting the blazing daytime
sun; but they were so silent that I ran squarely into them in the
jet-black, comfortably cool night, its dead silence broken only by the
creaking of a few tropical crickets.
I was awakened toward dawn as we drew up before a ranch-house and a
cattle-pen in a narrow creek. Here we wasted some time until daylight,
and then began loading fat young cattle by the crude and cruel Amazonian
method of lassooing and dragging them into the water, then hoisting them
up the side of the iron hull by the winch and the rope about their
horns, with many bumps and scratches and much bellowing and
eye-straining on the part of the helpless brutes. All this meant nothing
to the natives, however, being all in the day’s job, as was the packing
away tightly together of the cattle on the deadly slippery, iron lower
deck, where the sun poured in mercilessly a large part of the day and
where the animals would stand as best they could, probably without food
or water, for the four or five days left to Manaos. They cost an average
of 100$ a head here, and would sell for nearly three times that at their
destination. Slowly and leisurely all this went on, as if we had all the
rest of our lives to spend on the Amazon, and it was sun-blazing ten
o’clock before we pulled our mud-hook. There were countless floating
islands now, and big patches of coarse, light-green grass on their way
to the distant Atlantic. All day we slipped along, usually with a dugout
canoe or some other species of _montaria_ creeping along the extreme
lower edge of the forest; now a family gliding easily down to their
stilt-legged home, again boatmen bound for the rubber-fields paddling
desperately against the powerful current, as they had for weeks past and
would for a month or more to come, beneath these same heavy gray skies.
These Amazon watermen have a means of keeping dry that is simplicity
itself and which might be recommended, with reservations, in the
North,—they all carry a small bag made of native rubber, and when it
comes on to rain they pull off their clothes and put them in the bag!
The greatest product of the Amazon itself is the _pirarucú_, a mammoth
species of cod that dies in salt water, which sometimes attains ten feet
in length, and has no teeth, but a bony, rasp-like tongue. It is
harpooned in much the same way, on a smaller scale, as the whale, and is
a game fighter, more than one expert Amazon fisherman having been known
to make a _pirarucú_ tow him and his canoe home. It is the chief food of
the Amazon Valley and immense quantities are dried, salted, and shipped
from Pará, looking like boxed sticks of brown cordwood and not unlike
that in taste. _Pirarucú_ and _farinha d’agoa_ make up most Amazonian
meals, as they did on board the _Andirá_. We landed boxes of this staff
of life even at towns where the _pirarucú_ abounds, the lazy inhabitants
preferring to get it from Pará to catching and salting it themselves.
The largest fish of the Amazon, but much less common, is the
_peixe-boi_, or cow-fish. This is said to grow as large as a yearling
calf, is caught with harpoons and killed by driving stakes into its
nostrils, yielding a white meat not unlike pork in taste.
We sailed out upon the vast river again and took four hours to cross it,
stopping at the village of Jurity to leave a mailbag and dragging easily
on. Now and then a cloth was waved from some ranch along the river, the
boat whistled, and faintly to our ears was borne the shout of a man,
“_Ha um passageiro para Manaos!_” The captain, who seemed to know
everyone on the river by his first name, made a trumpet of his hands and
shouted back, “_O, Manoel! Na volta de Faro, ouvistes?_” And that night
we did pick him up on our return from Faro up the Yamundá.
One day the talk on board ran to _garzas_, the bird that furnishes what
we know as aigrets. A native passenger, once engaged in gathering them,
said that it took about seven hundred birds to give a kilogram of
feathers, even of the larger and cheaper size. They grow only along the
back and tail, and a kilogram of the largest feathers would number about
a thousand, the smaller and more valuable ones, of course, in
proportion, and would sell for 1$500 a gram in Manaos. In other words, a
pound of ordinary aigrets would bring the gatherer about a hundred
dollars at the normal exchange, and small ones as much as twice that
sum. Time was when a kilogram of small feathers sold for five contos,
say $1,600, “but for some reason we do not understand the demand in the
United States has ceased,” said the former hunter of _garzas_, “giving
the market a great slump.” I explained the reason for this, and after
musing for some time he admitted that it was rather a good law, not
because he recognized any cruelty to the birds, but because in time the
species would become extinct and another means of livelihood be cut off.
He claimed, however, and was supported by others on board, that it is
not necessary to kill the birds. He knew a man who had a big _garzal_
with thousands of them, and guards to see that no one killed any, and
every morning he went out and picked up the drooped feathers, getting
some eight kilograms a year, and from year to year, too, instead of only
once. He made it a rule to shoot anyone he found on his property with an
aigret in his possession. Then there was a Spaniard who had devised a
system of putting the birds into a heater at night, where several
feathers loosened enough to be pulled out in the morning. Dealers,
however, I recalled, thought little of “dead” aigrets and, as in the
case of diamonds, the whims of pretty woman force man to the roughest of
exertions to supply her demands, for real _garza_-hunting is no child’s
play. This man had known an American living in Obidos who used to have
himself rowed far up to the source of this or that tributary of the
Amazon, and then paddled down alone, arriving sometimes half a year
later with eight or ten kilograms of feathers, but half dead from his
struggle with the jungle. We frequently saw some of the birds in
question from the decks of the _Andirá_, tall, slender, graceful, and
generally snow-white, though there are species in other colors. A house
dealing in aigrets has to pay the State of Pará a license fee of 5,500$
a year, and ten per cent. ad valorem, while the _municipio_ collects 6$
an ounce for all feathers taken within its confines—which are generally
elastic. “So,” concluded the ex-aigret-hunter, “as usual the politicians
skim off most of the cream.”
On the morning of May 7 we drew up near a grass hut, flying the ugly
green and yellow flag of Brazil and standing above the water on stilts.
This, according to the captain, corroborated by several passengers, had
cost the taxpayers twenty-five contos—with free material close at hand,
and labor low in price, the actual cost of the building was probably not
one fortieth that amount. From it a _fiscal_ of the State of Pará came
on board to see what we were carrying out of the state, all of which
must pay export duty, for we had reached the boundary line between the
two immense states of Grão-Pará and Amazonas, including nearly half the
territory of mammoth Brazil. It was near here, at the mouth of the
Yamundá, that Francisco Orellano claimed he was attacked by amazons,
thereby giving its present name to the river of which his trickery and
bad fellowship made him the discoverer. “_Provavelmente estaba com o
miolo molle_” (He probably was with the brain soft), said one of the
passengers; but seeing how the Indian women of the Amazon basin work on
a basis of complete equality with the men suggests that perhaps there
was something besides an equatorial sun and a troubled conscience to
make the treacherous Spaniard fancy he had been pursued by female
warriors. When he came back from Spain to conquer his great river he
could not find it, but lost himself up a branch of the Tocantins.
That afternoon we went ashore in Parantins, first city in Amazonas, so
that at last I had seen everyone of the twenty states of Brazil, and
only the national territory of Acre, once a part of Bolivia, remained.
The city, just a little patch of red-tiled roofs in the endless stretch
of forest, stands on a bit of knoll jutting out into the Amazon, here
spreading away five miles or more to a flat, wooded, faintly discerned
shore and to the east and west running off over vast horizons on which
ships disappear “hull-down,” as at sea. Its slight elevation makes
Parantins breezy, though out of the breeze it is melting hot. I dropped
in upon several _caboclo_ families and found them instantly friendly,
though shy and modest, frank without knowing the meaning of that word,
most of all content to drift through life swinging languidly in a
hammock and gazing with dreamy eyes out across the broad, sun-bathed
Amazon. The houses had no particular furniture, except the hammocks,
swung or tied in a bundle on the mud walls, according to the hour,
though almost all contained a little hand-run American sewing-machine.
One house without a chair had two of these, and all had the crude
lace-pillow on which the women of North Brazil while away their time
making lace with a great rattling of _birros_.
Bounded on four sides by the ways of bygone generations, the people of
these contented Amazonian villages have little more than an idle
curiosity in the ways of the great outside world. Seeing nature about
them produce so abundantly and without apparent effort, it is small
wonder they are hopelessly lazy from our northern point of view.
Sometimes the thought comes even to the indefatigable American that
perhaps the secret of life after all is this contented waiting to be
overtaken by mañana, rather than a constant striving to outstrip the
future. Yet how the whole world, even these most distant little
backwaters, has changed in the first two decades of the present century,
with its persistent flooding of commerce and invention! All this makes
life more convenient, perhaps, but it gives the world a deadly monotony,
as if one sat down everywhere to the same trite moving-pictures, killing
anything national and characteristic by imported imitations from the
world’s centers, vastly increasing the price, while greatly lowering the
value, of living, destroying the excellence of local native production,
taking away its incentive, and making the vocation of traveler a drab,
uninspiring calling, enormously descended since the glorious days of
Marco Polo, or even of Richard Burton.
We passed, with much whistling and individual greetings, another
_gaiola_ of our line, the _Indio do Brazil_, so named, strangely enough,
not for the aborigines in general, but for a former senator from the
State of Pará, of whom this was the family name. I had just rolled into
my hammock when we stopped going forward and took to hunting about in
the dark, silent night for another wood-pile. The river was still and
smooth as glass; the light of a house on the shore-edge showed the faces
of a numerous white family peering out upon us, but it was so dark that
we slipped back and forth and frittered away much time before we located
the wood-pile and tied up before it. The owner came on board to gossip
as long as the ship remained, a chance not to be lost in these isolated
regions, and the constant chatter, added to the customary uproar on
board, made sleep out of the question until we were off again. There
were always new excuses for wasting our—or at least my—time. Early in
the afternoon we put out of the sea-broad river into a _paraná_ as
straight and narrow as the Suez Canal and suddenly anchored in the
weeds, a thousand miles from nowhere, to cut grass for the cattle!
In the sunset of May 8 dwellings grew more numerous in the dense
vegetation along shore, and at dusk the prettiest _fazenda_ we had yet
seen loomed up on a fine grassy plateau dotted with magnificent trees,
the haystack mango and the imperial palm most conspicuous among them.
The buildings were comfortable and roomy; there was a big barn for the
cattle, which the natives aboard did not know were ever housed, and an
unusual air of comfort and intelligent cultivation. I was not surprised,
therefore, to find it had all been built by an American, one of the many
Southerners who came down after the Civil War and settled along the
Amazon. At the age of sixty he had shot himself, rumor having it that he
had grown despondent because his children by a Brazilian wife were
growing up as worthless as the natives. His estate was on the edge of
Itacoatiara, last of the four principal ports on the way from Pará to
Manaos, where we went ashore while the captain visited more relatives
and where most of the unusually white population stood on the bank above
to greet all who landed. Here we received many more passengers, among
them a group of prisoners down on the lower deck with the cattle. The
captives had been sent here from Manaos to be tried, but were now being
sent back because the judge, a life appointee, but of what was now “the
opposition,” had not had his pay for a year and claimed in the current
number of the local sheet, which was almost entirely taken up with his
case, that he “had neither clothes nor shoes necessary to uphold the
dignity of appearing in public in such a high position.” As a matter of
fact, he was well known to be a man of independent wealth, but this was
an approved Brazilian way of “getting back at” his political enemies.
The prisoners were so mixed up with the other deck passengers, in
hammocks and on the bare deck, smoking and sleeping among the freight,
pigs, cows, turtles, sheep, and the soldiers sent to guard them,
similarly dressed in undergarments and the remnants of trousers, that
they were indistinguishable. I went down with the officer in charge, who
could not tell which were prisoners and which were soldiers or deck
passengers. He found one of his soldiers among the rubbish and told him
to go and point out the prisoners for my benefit; but even the soldier
could not tell them all, and after a long search one was still missing.
The officer put his toe against one fellow lying prone on the deck and
asked, “Are you one of the presos?” “_Não s’nho’_,” the man replied,
crawling to his feet, “I am one of the soldier guards.” We had about
given up finding the missing men when a fellow lolling most comfortably
in a hammock, smoking a cigarette, spoke up with obliging and cheery
friendliness, “I’m one of them, capitão,” at the same time tapping
himself proudly on the hairy chest showing through his open undershirt.
The night was so dense black—nights on the Amazon always seem to be jet
black, even when the sky is clear and the stars are out in myriads—that
the pilot could not find the river and finally ran crashing squarely
into the forest-jungle, where it was decided to anchor until daybreak.
It turned so chilly on the prow, even though I was considerably dressed
and covered with the thick sides of my hammock, that I took to shivering
as if my old Andean fever had overtaken me again. Heavy rain poured all
the morning, turning the world an ugly gray and so cold it was hard to
believe we were almost on the equator. These bitter cold spells are
common along the Amazon. In mid-morning we thrust our nose into a
farmyard again and changed from a ship to a grass-cutting machine. The
rain continued in an unbroken deluge, and early in the afternoon we came
out of a _paraná_ upon the Amazon proper, so broad we could not see
across it and differing from the ocean only in color. The rain
decreased, but the chill continued, and at three o’clock we reached the
mouth of the Rio Negro and left the Amazon behind. For there onward the
main stream of what the aborigines called the Maranhão, and which I had
seen rise high up on the Peruvian plateau, is known as the Solimões from
where it enters Brazil at Tabatinga. The two rivers, both of immense
width at this point, joined but for some time did not mingle together,
the yellow of the Amazon remaining perfectly distinct from the “black”
of the Negro, as black as any deep, clear water without a blue sky to
reflect can be. Here and there patches of the two waters mixed and for a
long time flowed northward perfectly distinct in color, then, like the
population, united to form the nondescript hue of the main stream.
More and more huts and houses appeared along the shore, a bluff of
dark-reddish soil, as the few scratches showed, the rest being virgin
forest flooded up to the lower branches of the trees. The hut of many a
poor _caboclo_ was inundated, and some were standing disconsolately
ankle-deep in the water, holding the baby in their arms. Others had let
go the solid earth altogether and, thrusting a few logs in raft form
under their huts, floated off comfortably as you please, swinging as
domestically and calmly in their hammocks as if they were lodged in the
“Café da Paz,” their few possessions on crude shelves above them and
only the black, fathomless river and a few logs laid far apart for
floor. Huts, generally on stilts, became almost continuous, all, for
some reason, built out over the water instead of up on the top of the
bluff out of the wet—if it were possible to get out of the wet in such a
climate. But the _caboclos_ of the Amazon pay little attention to rain,
water being their native element, and many now appeared, male and
female, paddling homeward at the same calm, even pace in the downpour as
in the finest of weather. Farther on a few huts had broad dirt steps cut
up the face of the bluff from the water’s edge. Then dimly across the
black sea there began to paint itself a faint line of ships at anchor,
with gaps in it, like an army just after a machine-gun attack. As we
drew nearer, the _chacaras_ and “summer-houses” of rich _Manaoenses_
appeared, nicely arranged along the top of the bluff where they could
escape from the dreadful urban rush of Manaos. Then gradually, out of
the unbroken wilderness ahead, a modern city began to appear around a
densely wooded point, finally disclosing itself in its entirety through
the wet atmosphere. Piled up on a low knoll and part of another,
looking, already as complete as many an old European city, the
yellow-blue dome of the imposing state theater bulking above all else
except the brick tower of the cathedral, Manaos was utterly exotic in
this Amazonian wilderness; it was like coming upon a great medieval
castle in mid-ocean.
Our rubber-estate owner from the Acre, who had lived in an open
undershirt all the way from Pará, suddenly appeared on deck
resplendent in a white suit with broad silk lapels, a gay silk
waistcoat with six American $2.50 gold-pieces as buttons, a diamond
scarfpin resembling a lighthouse, and four diamond rings on his
fingers. We swung in toward the big Manaos brewery—looking not unlike
the Woolworth building through this hazy humidity—in its hollow
between the two knolls, and at length tied up to one of the many
buoys, each marked with the cost of its rental per day, floating half
a mile or more out from the city. For though we might have anchored in
an ocean port, the Rio Negro averages forty-five fathoms in depth
directly off the wharves. From these several boatloads of officials
soon put out, followed by boatmen, baggage-carriers, and hotel runners
with the first news of the outside world we had heard in ten days.
There were as many formalities as if we had arrived direct from
Europe, both the port doctor and the customs officers having to be
satisfied before any of the rowboats, of which there were at least
three for every passenger landing and which without exception were
manned by European white men, could approach the gangway. I embraced
the captain, the _immediato_, and a few fellow-passengers—male
only—and bade them contentment, if not speed, on the much longer
journey still ahead of them.
Manaos, a thousand miles up the Amazon and nine above the mouth of the
Rio Negro, though only twenty meters above sea-level, is a real city
more than half a century old. By reason of some peculiar lay of the land
it is less troubled with rain, and in consequence is less sloppy, than
Pará. The chief objection to the place during my first two days there
was that it was so cold; after that it was nearly always brilliant with
a slashing sun and humid heat that seemed to multiply through the hot
thicknesses of the night, until for the first time I was conscious of
feeling my energy in any way curtailed by the climate. Great heat and
constant humidity producing a vegetation so prolific that man cannot
hold his own against nature, Manaos was not only jostled on all sides by
the impudent jungle, but right in town there were many patches of
rampant wilderness and immense beautiful trees that seemed to be forces
of occupation from the surrounding forests. Much split up by hollows, it
had _igarapés_, or tropical creeks, so covered with fresh-green
water-plants, often in blossom, that one could not tell them from solid
ground, while many a swamp musical with bullfrogs, and innumerable
mosquito incubators, were within a short stroll of the European center
of town. Manaos has fewer unpaved streets than its rival at the mouth of
the river, and being on rolling ground, while Pará is flat, it boasts a
few more scenic beauties; but the visitor constantly has the sensation
of watching an unequal fight between the exotic city and the mighty
wilderness that surrounds it.
Time was when Manaos was much more of a city. The high price of rubber
had perhaps forever gone, and the “Rubber City” gave signs of
disappearing again into the jungle from which it had risen. As the
Italian proprietor of the “Rotisserie Sportsman” I sometimes patronized
said weepingly, “I would have done much better to have gone to hell than
to have come to Manaos.” Every down boat for months had been crowded to
utmost capacity with passengers of all classes and origins fleeing the
poverty that had settled upon Amazonia. So swift had been the
depopulation that I could much more easily have rented a large house
than a single furnished room; so scarce were “distinguished foreigners”
that the arrival of a stranger attracted as much attention as in a
village, and I might myself have called on the governor of the largest
state of Brazil, had I brought with me the heavy black costume of
formality which a local editor was so astonished to find me traveling
without. Yet news of this ebbing tide did not seem to have spread far.
The booming of a certain section of the world is like setting a heavy
body in motion—once it has gained momentum it is hard to stop—and a
considerable number of immigrants were still coming to Manaos expecting
to make a quick fortune because a description of it in “boom days” years
before had at last reached their local papers. Even when these hopeful
fortune seekers met returning victims, they often refused to believe
them, taking their pessimism to be canny competition, and persisted in
pushing on to be disillusioned in person.
Yet it still had all the outward concomitants of a real city. For almost
the first time in Brazil I had my clothes washed properly, and in hot
water. John Chinaman, virtually unknown in the rest of the republic, did
it. Even the chief places of amusement for money-oozing rubber-gatherers
were still open, though the more aristocratic of the inmates had gone
back to France or sought more promising pastures, leaving the field to
stolid, vulgar, Polish and Russian Jewesses. As in all Brazil, there was
no attempt to bolster up waning commerce by selling better things more
cheaply; on the contrary, the rare victim was expected to make up for
the absence of his fellows. Restaurants and hotels habitually made one
thousand to fifteen hundred per cent. profit on their food. A kilogram
of beef cost a _milreis_ in the market, or even less after the day
warmed; and this was cut into from ten to fifteen so-called beefsteaks
that sold as high as two milreis each in the restaurants, even of
workingmen. In the market three oranges cost 100 reis; on the restaurant
table across the street one cost five times that; a _mamão_ selling for
300 reis was cut into five or six pieces at 500 each. But the
Brazilians, too indolent or too proud to go into the restaurant business
themselves, continued as usual “fazenda fita” and paid whatever was
demanded by their exploiters; or, if they could not pay, they remained
away hungry in the darker corners of their homes.
Manaos is a white man’s city, if there is one in Brazil. Not only are
the shops mainly in the hands of Europeans or “Turks,” but virtually all
manual labor is done by barefooted white men,—Portuguese, Spanish, or
Italian for the most part. The _boínas_ of the Pyrenees are frequently
seen on the heads of carters and carriers; the laboring class, both male
and female, is largely from the Iberian peninsula,—Portuguese women of
olive-white complexions darkened by the grime of a life-time, with huge
earrings dangling against their necks, and men who would look perfectly
at home in any Spanish _pueblo_ or Galician mountain village. Many of
the customs of Rio have been imported, too,—the bread-man’s whistle, the
vegetable peddler with his two baskets, the stick-clapping, walking
clothing-stores from Asia Minor. Yet, according to the American of most
standing in Manaos, eight months a year is as much as any white
foreigner should live in the place. He knew many a bright, well-educated
young Englishman, who had been sent out hale and hearty, to remain so
physically, but to become so childish in mind that he had sometimes
wondered whether there was not something in the German claim that the
British are degenerating. Is civilization, after all, determined by
climate? “After a white man has lived steadily for twenty years in the
tropics, the less said about him the better, as a general rule,”
asserted this exiled fellow-countryman. Energy depends, in his opinion,
on variable climate; the monotony of perpetual summer saps ambition;
bracing Europe and North America must forever remain breeding-, or at
least feeding-grounds for the rulers of tropical lands.
Strangely enough, there are no classes in Manaos street-cars, and one
may ride even without socks. The tramway and electric-light system is
English owned and is so British that the cars run on the left-hand
track; yet its intellectual motive power was furnished by a man from
far-off Maine. I had not spoken a word of English since leaving Pará,
and naturally lost no time in finding an excuse to make his
acquaintance. He had brought with him his native adaptability. It has
always been a great problem in Brazil to get street-car fares into the
coffers of the foreign companies operating them. Cash registers are of
little use, for they respond only to actual ringing. It is more common
to require the conductor to carry a booklet of receipts and hand one out
whenever a fare is paid. But the difficulty is to make people demand the
receipts, for the usual Brazilian way is to wave a hand backward at the
conductor, as much as to say, “Oh, keep the money! The company is rich,
and they are foreigners anyway.” Years ago some street-car manager
thought up the plan of making each receipt worth two reis to charity,
the company once a month paying to the nuns’ hospital that amount for
each one turned in to them. This system, widespread in Brazil, was in
vogue in Manaos when the man from Maine arrived, but it was not working
perfectly. The new manager knew that charity to others is a far less
potent motive with Brazilians than possible personal fortune and the
universal love of gambling. He withdrew the charity clause, therefore,
gave each of the receipts a number, and on the second day of every month
the Manaos tramway company holds a lottery drawing, with the first prize
100$ and the rest in proportion. It is a rare _Manaoense_ who does not
demand his receipt for fare paid nowadays.
The only other American resident of Manaos was Briggs. It was doubly
worth while to call on Briggs, for in addition to the good fellowship
which quickly arises between compatriots exiled in far-off lands, free
beer was unlimited to those to whom Briggs took a liking—and for those
who have to pay for it, beer is a rare luxury in Manaos. Briggs was the
man who made Manaos endurable, who kept it cool and quenched its thirst,
a man who always made one think of ice and iced drinks, though there was
nothing icy about him. He was dictator and commander-in-chief of the
ice-plant at the tall Manaos brewery, native owned but, strangely
enough, run by a German. I hesitate to admit, failed, in fact, to
compute, the number of times I might have been seen emerging from
Briggs’ sanctum wiping from my mustache the circumstantial evidence of a
glass of beer.