Brazil on the Move

From the Snowpeaks into Amazonas

In the summer of 1962 my wife and daughter and I took the jet flight from New York which landed us, long before we had become accustomed to the thought of arriving there, in Lima. After a couple of weeks amid the mystifications of Peruvian politics and the marvels of ancient textiles and sculptured ceramics in the Lima museums and the grandeur of the Stone Age architecture of the Andes, we are heading for Brazil.

Our plane left the old Faucett airport before dawn, circled over the dim city and the shrouded ocean and turned sharply into the daybreak. Now we are boring into the glare of the risen sun as we climb over the cocoacolored mountains that thrust up like islands through the cottony overcast which hangs eternally over the seaboard desert of the Pacific slope. No more vegetation on them than on the face of the moon. The first waters we see below us, thin trickles taking a northward course down the far slopes of the coastal cordillera, are already bound for the Amazon.

Except for some high thin cirrus the air is clear beyond the coastal range. The further mountains rear rock faces of up-ended strata, black organshapes in the shadow. Beyond, crystal sharp against a green horizon, tower the snowpeaks.

Between the heaving slopes of the second and third ranges the Urubamba River, tumbling northward in glassclear rapids out of the southern confines of Peru, drains the valleys and canyons which were the seat of the Andean civilizations. There we had walked panting among the earthquake-battered remnants of Spanish Cuzco which totter precariously on the unshakable foundations fitted together stone by stone by the ancient Indian builders. We had seen the huge citadel of Sacsahuamán squatting on the mountain above Cuzco and, in the valley beyond, Ollantaytambo’s pyramid of ruins guarding its circus of green hills terraced in prehistoric days to the very summit. A few miles downstream we had scrambled around the stony masses of Machu Picchu, perched two thousand feet above the brawling river on a toothed height as steep as the mountains the Chinese painters imagined for their landscapes.

Two hundred miles north of Machu Picchu the Urubamba joins the Tambo to form the Ucayali which becomes navigable for river boats at Pucallpa. Already you can reach Pucallpa by truck or jeep or with luck by car from Lima. The Peruvians are pushing through a paved road from the coast to Pucallpa and its Brazilian extension is already groping its way through the wilderness of the new state of Acre to reach Pôrto Velho on the Madeira River six hundred miles to the east.

From Pucallpa barges and small river boats take five or six days to reach Iquitos. Iquitos, still in Peru, twentythree hundred miles from the Atlantic, is head of navigation for oceangoing steamers on the Amazon. From the junction of the Ucayali with Rio Marañón some fifty miles from Iquitos the Peruvians call the great river the Amazon, but the Brazilians insist that it is the Rio Solimoes until, more than a thousand miles downstream, it joins the Rio Negro below Manaus.

A Rainforest Economy

The only practical way of reaching Iquitos is by air. The head of ocean navigation of the Amazon is still an island inaccessible by road. After flitting between the jagged snowteeth of the highest Andes the plane starts to toboggan downward through the massed cumulus clouds that steam up incessantly from the rainy eastern slopes.

After rumbling for a long time amid a churn of mist we begin to see trees through rents in the clouds. The wooded slopes below us heave in ridges cut by swift straight streams occasionally barred by the white spume of rapids. As the hills subside the rivers seem for a while to strangle in the rainforest.

Now we are flying low over what seems a mossy plain, only the tendrils of the moss are gigantic trees. The rivers have broken through below us, muddy and turgid now, and flow in restless curves from oxbow to oxbow. As far as you can see in every direction the forest is cut by the meanderings and the arabesques of rampaging rivers.

We are looking down on an unending struggle between the weight of the hurrying water and the fibrous density of the treepacked land. This titanic wrestling match has left the jungle scarred by the scratches of old riverbeds as if by the claws of some vast jaguar. The rivers slither like great snakes between the tottering trees, leaving their castoff courses to one side or the other in lagoons and sickleshaped backwaters. In some places the subsiding waters have left reedy ponds or palegreen savannas. Every shape you see results from the war between land and water. There’s still not a sign of human occupation. Not a canoe, not a hut, not a smoke.

We are headed east flying low above the olivegreen coils of the Rio Marañon when, along the broadly curving silty beaches, a different green appears which could be rice that human hands have sown. A log half pulled up on a beach might be a dugout. A pile of dry palm leaves might be a thatched hut. There is smoke from brush fires.

Now there is an unmistakable canoe, the flash of the paddle of a man paddling in the bow. A long thatched object moving upstream must be a motorboat. There’s a road below with toy trucks, tin roofs, tiled roofs under palms, a beach hatched with rows of dugouts, a wide stretch of river full of canoes and launches; and the plane is spiraling down into the airfield.

Iquitos turns out to be two towns. There’s the outpost Peruvian city: a gridiron of streets of stone and rubble houses, stores, banks, a motion picture theater, markets, a hotel on a bluff overlooking the river run by the Peruvian Government to encourage tourists; and then there’s the Amazonian river town. This they call the port of Belén.

In the port everything is afloat. Houses, built of poles and thatch tied together with jungle vines, are set on rafts made of great logs of various light woods similar to balsawood. At high water the whole settlement would be afloat in the river but the waters in the upper Amazon basin are low now (mid-August), so half the riverport is stranded on the brown beach.

The houses stretch for half a mile in straggling rows. On the hump of the great sand bar are thatched shops selling groceries and drygoods, bars, small restaurants. The river merchants buy snakeskins, pelts, and alligator hides, bananas, rice. At the entrance to one thatched hut is a crate of orange and brown small monkeys. Their tiny black faces peer out wretchedly through the slats. From another door a big black terrapin is just about to make good his escape when he’s recaptured and turned ignominiously over on his back.

There are pet parrots and parakeets everywhere. Pigs and small children roam in the alleys. A dead iguana rots in a puddle at the river’s edge. Black buzzards perch on the roof-trees.

It is hot. The place smells, but now and then a gust of freshness comes from the river. The people are quiet and friendly and go about their business with an air of great goodnature. Nobody stares at a stranger.

These are not exactly Peruvians or Brazilians. They are river people of the Amazon, made up perhaps two thirds of forest Indian, a third of various brownskinned Mediterranean strains with a touch of Negro. They are darker than the Indians of the forest tribes.

The river is full of coming and going in dugout canoes, or in enlarged dugouts driven by an outboard motor where the passengers sit comfortably under a light thatch of palm leaves. There are motorboats and launches in all sorts of homemade shapes. Women are arriving from little hamlets up and down stream in their brightest clothes to market and to buy and sell. The man paddling is always in the bow. Often the woman in the stern has a pink or red sunshade.

On the bank, and from the rafts the houses float on, women are washing clothes. Brown children are bathing. One stark naked little girl, modestly hidden from view by an enormous straw hat bigger than she is, is dunking herself between her home and the muddy shore.

Further out men fish from canoes, using fishspears or throwing a round casting net. An occasional old man bottom-fishes with a bamboo pole. Fish are plentiful we are told because the water is low. Among the canoes dolphins occasionally surface, the famous pink porpoises of the Amazon. Some are pinkish, some light gray, some black. A boy tells us that the black ones are dangerous. They have been known to attack a canoe.

Iquitos proper — some people told us it had fifty thousand, others eighty thousand inhabitants — has considerable business in spite of the lack of overland links to the rest of the world. Everything that doesn’t come by air has to come by river. The manager of one of the three Bata shoestores told us that he found it more economical to fly in his shoes from the factory in Callao. This was because of the pilfering that went on during the long truck and boat haul via Pucallpa.

Gasoline is cheap and plentiful as the crude oil comes down river from the Peruvian fields in the upper Marañon to a distillery a few miles below Iquitos. There’s a plant for processing chicle brought in from the forest, an alcohol distillery and a sawmill for tropical woods.

The docks and warehouses for oceangoing steamers, mostly monthly ships of the Booth Line out of Liverpool, are new and modern. The channel is reported to have ample depth for ships drawing fourteen feet. The city is the furnishing center for a huge region of the upper Amazon basin reaching to the Ecuadorian and Colombian borders. Protected by chloroquin from malaria and by the vaccine from jungle yellow fever, with the help of outboard motors the mestizo watermen and half civilized Indians are pushing up the rivers of the upper Amazon basin in all directions. They are fast annihilating the wild life.

Shrunken heads are a thing of the past. The few smuggled with great pretense of secrecy to gullible tourists are mostly dried monkey skulls.

Science’s insatiable demand for small primates is depleting the monkey tribes. One dealer, a young man who started a number of years ago with a hundred soles for capital, and is now reputed to be a millionaire, told us how his hunters caught the poor banderlog. They pick a tree frequented by bands of small monkeys and hang ripe bananas in the branches to attract them. Gradually they get the monkeys accustomed to eating their bananas on the ground and then they set out pans of sweetened aguardiente among the bananas. The monkeys take to drinking it. The bands of drunken monkeys, the dealer told us, were irresistibly comic. Imagine a drunken monkey trying to peel a banana. When they are so drunk they can’t climb, the hunters rush in and thrust them by the hundreds into burlap bags.

The large monkeys that roam in family groups have a grimmer fate. Since a shotgun would scare them, the hunters still use the Indian pucuna (serebatana is the Spanish and Portuguese name). The blowgun is a remarkably deadly weapon, shooting a tiny dart poisoned with curare with great force and accuracy at short range. The hunters shoot an old male, who is usually carrying a baby monkey on his back, and bag the rest of them when they crowd around to try to carry off the corpse. So that the monkeys can’t pull the darts out in time the head of the dart is cut so that it breaks off under the skin. Curare kills even a large animal like a jaguar or tapir, we were told, in less than ten seconds.

There are seven firms in Iquitos exporting wild animals and tropical fish direct to the States. Tropical fish are the money makers. A rare specimen will bring a thousand soles. The story goes that there are more varieties of fish in the Amazon region than in all the other fresh waters of the world put together.

The trader equips the fishermen with boat and outboard and nets. When they bring in the fish he keeps them alive in tanks feeding them on tiny leeches which he breeds for the purpose until they can be sorted and counted. An expert waterman will count and sort forty thousand in an hour. Fungus diseases are the worst enemy.

The fish are shipped in plastic bags packed in cartons. Some of the spiny catfish types and the savage piranha have to be dosed with tranquilizers before they are packed so that they won’t tear their plastic bags to pieces en route. A weekly plane from Miami picks up the shipments of fish and forest animals for sale to pet shops and laboratories. Recently shipments have started direct to Hamburg, Germany.

The tropical fish dealer told us that his main difficulty was keeping his fishermen at work. An independent lot. The most skillful only needed to work for him two or three times a year to keep going. When they made a few hundred dollars they would knock off and drink pisco and collect women until their money was all gone. The tribal Indians are monogamous. In most tribes only the curaca (chief) is allowed more than one wife; but the half-breed watermen pride themselves on the number of women they can keep. The trader told of a man with a plantation way up one of the tributary rivers, who kept seventeen. Each has her appointed job, fishing, tending manioc plantings, cooking, weaving mats or hammocks, making pottery. A happy family, the trader called them.

Iquitos has a budding tourist trade. A very blond German named Herman Becker has a camp on the Rio Mamón a few miles out of town and arranges trips out into the rainforest. His brighteyed Portuguese wife is an enthusiast for life al aire libre. Cruising in the fresh breeze up the endlessly winding rivers, seated under an umbrella in an outboard-driven dugout canoe is one of the pleasantest ways of traveling imaginable.

Becker’s camp is full of local pet animals. It’s like The Swiss Family Robinson. None of them are in cages. They seem to stay around because they like it. There is a kinkajou, several monkeys — one of them looks like a black Winston Churchill — parrots and macaws, a toucan, and a trompetero. The trompetero is a businesslike walking bird who eats ants and insects and joins the party when Mr. Becker’s tourists walk through the jungle trails and to visit the half Indian settlements around about.

Roque, a Yagua boy whose grandfather was the tribal medicine man, walks ahead with a machete. Poor Roque, much against his will, has to put on his grass skirt and headdress when he shows off his skill with the blowgun for the visitors. When he is allowed to get back into his shirt and pants — like people — you can see the satisfaction stand out all over him. He leads the way through the forest path hacking at the underbrush with his machete.

This is a Saturday. In the first palmleaf shelter we visit the man of the family is asleep dead drunk on the floor. His hairless face wears an expression of innocent satisfaction. It is explained that there has been some sort of fiesta. His women and children peer out sleepily from the shadows of the hut.

In the next set of huts a tall man with an aquiline nose rises to greet us. With a dignified gesture he invites us to sit on a bench under his thatch. He offers bananas. He’s somewhat oddly dressed. He wears what looks like a woman’s boudoir cap on his curly gray head and an assortment of blazerlike garments over a weird striped shirt. A man of means. There’s an outboard motor in the yard and a shiny new piano accordion on one of the beds. A bottle of Italian vermouth stands among grimy glasses on the table. Mrs. Becker explains that he’s the best hunter in the region, the father of twentyfour children out of two wives. His womenfolk raise guineapigs in a little corral. We pass the time of day with him in formal Spanish.

In other huts scattered under the trees we find the women working on pottery. Since they have no wheel even the largest pots are built up by hand out of long snakes of kneaded clay coiled in a spiral. Firing them on the embers without an oven is long and tedious and highly expert work. Then they are painted with handsome geometric designs and glazed and fired again. “Lazy things,” says Mrs. Becker, “they’ll only work when they feel like it.”

A bonanza came to this whole part-Indian, part-halfbreed settlement a few nights ago when a herd of peccary swam the river and invaded their manioc plantation. The villagers turned out with clubs and guns and killed fiftysix. That means fresh and smoked meat for weeks. They proudly show us the skins — which bring a good price in Iquitos — stretched and salted for drying and several peccary shoats they captured for pets.

This happygolucky life is not without a certain enchantment. In another hut we find a group of men celebrating over a bottle of some kind of rotgut. More European blood here. You can tell by the stubbly beards. They swarm about us to offer us drinks. The stuff in the bottle smells like wood alcohol. We refuse as politely as possible. It’s already dusk and they really are too drunk.

The man with the bottle latches onto my arm. “Doctor, you must have a drink”—in these parts anybody who can read and write is addressed as Doctor—“Mr. Engineer,” he pleads, “please take a drink with us.” How can a man refuse?

One gulp does it. We break away and hurry down the slippery riverbank to the waiting canoe.

The Photographer’s Redskins

The other tourist entrepreneur is the local photographer, a genial and hospitable gentleman named Antonio Wong, who set up a hunting camp on the Rio Manaté, some fifty miles downstream from Iquitos, years ago before tourists were dreamed of, for his own pleasure, so he tells us. An enthusiastic hunter, he never hunts without a couple of Yagua Indians to find him the game. He whisks us downstream in a speedboat.

After lunch at his thatched and mosquito-netted camp set high on stilts on the bank of a narrow winding tributary river, we visit his private tribe of Indians. A large launch load of French tourists has come in ahead of us. The Indians — Yaguas of Mr. Wong’s pet tribe — have come down specially from their settlement three and a half hours’ walk back in the forest. They have dressed in their best grass skirts and grass headdresses to be shown off to the tourists. After the French depart Mr. Wong has us distribute cigarettes to the men and marshmallow candies to the ladies. He makes each of us hand out one item to each member of the tribe. In return the Indians present us with the little crowns of palm leaves they are wearing on their heads.

They are lightolive healthylooking people with mellow brown eyes. Their faces are daubed with ochre. Only a few of the women and children have the puffed-up bellies that come from eating too much cassava. They seem to be enormously amused by the tourists. Though they can’t understand Spanish they laugh and laugh at the slightest thing anyone says. Perhaps it’s embarrassment but more likely it is frank entertainment at the strange creatures that have appeared from the outer world. We get to laughing too. We look into each other’s faces and laugh and laugh.

The curaca is a very young man but the witch doctor is old with a crinkled parchment skin. He stands hesitantly off by himself as if he weren’t quite sure what his attitude should be.

After a while a flute and drum start playing a simple but not at all outlandish little tune and Mr. Wong and the oldest of the women, an old lady with numbers of rubber tires round her waist, dance a sort of twostep with incredible solemnity. It’s a sight worth coming three thousand miles to see.

A Swiss gentleman has been bringing the house down by giving extra cigarettes to the Indians who have traces of whiskers. This proves an enormous joke because it’s well-known that the forest Indians have very little hair on their bodies. Everybody roars. After giggling with them for a while more in their palmleaf shelter set high on stilts, where the women are smoking a few fish over a smoldering fire, we part amid fresh gales of laughter and return to our speedboat.

How come, we ask Mr. Wong, when we have him alone, that some of the Yagua women have permanent waves? Mr. Wong explains with a show of annoyance that it’s these Syrian traders. The Turkos, as they are known, scour the rivers in motorboats buying wild animal and reptile skins. To avoid paying in money they give the Indian women permanents in return for valuable pelts. Disgusting, says Mr. Wong.

Flight Downriver

From Iquitos to Manaus there’s only one flight a week. The plane is a Catalina flying boat of the amphibian type known to the U. S. Navy in the Pacific war as a P.B.Y. Most of the sixteen seats are already taken so we have to crawl through the narrow waist to places scrunched up against the radio man’s little table. Wicker seats have been set in the hull but otherwise very little has been done for the comfort of the passengers. There’s a reek of gasoline. The only ventilation comes when the pilots open their side windows.

The seaplane rattles like a truckload of scrap as it takes off. We fly out over the river and cut across its windings in the early haze. The mist rises from the great trees in thin wisps like cotton batting twisted between thumb and forefinger. We cruise at a couple of thousand feet above the rainforest. In every direction the treetops stretch to the horizon.

Things are pleasantly informal aboard. The prettily gotten up Brazilian girl in the front seat must be the pilot’s ladyfriend because before long she is sitting on his lap. So that the other passengers shan’t feel neglected he invites us in rotation to climb into the copilot’s seat where the air is fresh and the view magnificent. The steward, crawling among the packages that obstruct the seaplane’s narrow waist, keeps plying us with gummy sandwiches and sicksweet guaraná. Guaraná, which can be quite good, is the national soft drink of Brazil. The Peruvian lady sitting next to my wife asks her if she minds the smell of the package she holds on her lap: it is fresh turtle meat she is carrying to a friend in Manaus.

After a couple of hours we were trundling down the landing strip at Letícia. Having dim memories of a noisy border dispute years ago between Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, which was settled, if I remember right, by Rondón’s border commission awarding the place to Peru, I expected to find frontier guards, customs officers, and the like. There must be a village, but we saw no sign of it. We found the tiny new airport completely deserted except for a large crate of green parakeets. Inside were cartons and cartons full of plastic bags of tropical fish waiting for shipment. Out back a single dilapidated stationwagon stood waiting on the rutted road that wound off into the jungle.

Letícia is situated on the north bank of the Peruvian Amazon near the point where the borders of the three republics meet. If there were any internal trade between them the place should be an important riverport. Outside of the freight carried overseas by the Booth Line boats from Iquitos, the only largescale shipments we could hear of in these upper reaches of the river were the bargeloads of crude oil that go down from the Peruvian oilfields to the Brazilian government refinery near Manaus. The young man who managed one of the Bata shoestores in Iquitos had recently made a trip downstream to try to arrange some way of selling his product in the Brazilian settlements. He had come back discouraged. Bureaucratic complications made it impossible.

At Benjamin Constant, named for the Brazilian positivist who, as one of Pedro II’s ministers, helped negotiate his abdication and became known to history as the father of the republic, we alight on the sleek brown surface of a river. This is the first Brazilian outpost, on the Rio Yavarí just above its junction with the main stream of the Amazon. The seaplane is pulled in to a landing by hawsers and a Negro boy and a white boy start working a twohanded pump to suck the gasoline out of drums scattered on the steep sticky clay bank.

While we are lounging around the float in the punishing sun, waiting for the boys to pump the tanks full, we find ourselves looking into a canoe which contains an unmistakably American portable refrigerator, a picnic basket with a thermos, a little blond boy in jumper and shorts, and a young American couple in straw hats. Just the group you would see in a national park in the States. Before we have a chance to attract their attention the man has started the outboard and they go gliding away up the river.

Later we learned that these were missionaries who had started a school, just the two of them, to teach reading and writing and some simple hygiene to the river dwellers, and that the fame of their school had spread far and wide.

On the takeoff the water roars about the hull, and surges olivecolored over the ports. The old amphibian, shaking and creaking, hitches itself above the treetops. The treetops spread to the horizon in every direction. As we soar, from the copilot’s seat we can look out over the forest for ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred miles. Beyond those miles the same rivers the same treetops spread for a thousand miles to the north, to the south, to the west, and eastward for two thousand and more. The trees hide tiny settlements. In the open stretches of water between them you might see fishermen in canoes, or a lost gunboat with washing hung out to dry on the forward deck, showing the flag that flaunts the sovereignty of one of the three sovereign states. Hunters and fishermen, a few families collecting fruits and nuts, logging crews, now and then a sawmill. Thatched huts of halfbreeds who collect chicle and latex. The Weeping Wood, the romancers called it, the Green Hell. Outside of Antarctica it is the largest extension of terrain in the world that the human race has left unoccupied.

After Benjamin Constant the Catalina skims downstream, often following the river for many miles. We stop at occasional collections of thatched huts. At each stop the shape of the canoes that come alongside is a little different and the heartshaped paddles have a different design. The birds change; in some places herons predominate, in others flocks of small white gulls. Only the buzzards remain the same and the big cheerful yellowbellied bird you find all over Brazil, named from his call, Bem-ti-ví- (I see you). At one stop the only passenger to come aboard, along with a tiny package of mail, is a large scarlet macaw consigned to Manaus.

As we fly east the fine morning turns into a murky noon. It’s bumpy going amid the boiling clouds. Whenever there’s an opening below, a new river seems to be joining the main stream. Never the glimpse of a steamboat. Even canoes are rare. You can’t tell which is the main river among the many parallel channels boiling through the coppery glare. Below everything is hurrying water, dark islands seen through slanting stripes of rain, a flash of silver beyond a dark elbow of densepacked trees, a bilious khakitinted channel where some muddy confluent has poured in. A landscape like Gustave Doré’s dreams of hell.

At last we break out of the overcast and glide through sunlight over the lake of Tefé. The water is the color of clear weak coffee. The town of Tefé has an oddly civilized look, with one small row of houses that might be on the banks of the Seine. The air is clear as the water. The sky is full of gulls. There’s a cool breeze blowing. The passengers troop up the steep duckboards to the local boardinghouse where lunch is laid out on long tables. Turkey and rice and black beans and baked bananas all sprinkled with cassava flour. At the grocery next door you can buy cold beer.

From Tefé to Manaus is four long hours through turbulent clouds. In spite of cotton stuffed in our ears the motors are deafening. Legs are cramped. By the time the old Catalina goes slambanging down the runway at the Manaus airport the sudden night of the tropics is closing down.

Haunted City

Manaus, the capital of the vastest and least populated of the states that make up the Brazilian union, climbs a group of hills behind a bluff some ten miles above the junction of the Rio Negro with the Rio Solimoes to form the oceanlike flood of muddy fresh water the Brazilians call the Rio Mar, their Amazon. It is a city beset with nostalgia.

The opera house on the hill, now restored to all its gaudy splendor, testifies not only to the exuberant bad taste of the late nineteenth century but to a certain enthusiasm of the grand era of capitalist promotion which can never be recaptured. The fortunes of the rubber barons who put up the money to build it have long since been spent and forgotten, but ghosts of old bonanzas linger in the fetid streets which lead up to the wide square the building fronts on, which is paved in wavy mosaic like the famous Rocio in Lisbon.

The enormous steel pontoons of the floating wharves so ingeniously arranged to rise and fall with the stages of the Rio Negro are monuments not only to the nineteenth century’s engineering skill, but also to its faith in the inevitable benefits of world commerce linking the nations. The crowding steamers from every European port that kept the central conveyor railroad so busy sank to the bottom during the First World War and were never replaced, but impressive traces of steamship offices and freight agencies still remain in the downtown buildings.

The wide ruined avenues with their broken pavements, dark at night because there is not enough electric power to light them, the scarfaced public buildings designed at the Paris Beaux-Arts, the neglected parks where rampant trees have invaded the footpaths, the dilapidated European trolley-cars, the empty aviary and the gay little clock tower that’s lost its clock in the waterfront square which is the center of the city’s traffic, all still echo memories of mighty projects that have failed.

Manaus is haunted by every feverish dream that has flitted through the shadows of this most enormous of the world’s rainforests ever since Orellana, more than four hundred years ago, after straying away from one of Pizarro’s expeditions, made his first desperate journey downriver. On the heels of the slavers and the prospectors for diamonds and the placerminers for gold came the seringueiros: the exploitation and the peonage and the quick riches of the great rubber boom. Borracha is still a word to conjure with.

An Englishman named Henry Wickham, whose name is a hissing among the riversettlements, smuggled seeds of Hevea brasiliensis, the wild rubber tree, out to the Malay States. Intelligent selection produced improved varieties and Amazonia lost its monopoly of the world market. The exploitation of Amazonian rubber strangled in its own ineptitude. Cultivated rubber soon proved it could outsell the wild product even in its home port. The production of synthetics, spurred on by the exigencies of the Second World War, relegated the natural product to a still more subsidiary position; but today an increasing demand, resulting from inordinately increased production in the automotive and electrical goods industries, has opened a new market for various natural rubber, latex, and gutta-percha products.

The challenge of Amazon rubber appealed to Henry Ford’s imagination. He was bound he’d find a way to cultivate the rubber tree in its natural home, but his carefully planned and segregated settlements; Fordlândia, and Belterra on the Rio Tapajós, have hardly left any more trace than the huts of the slaphappy seringueiros who plodded through the forests gathering the “tears” of the wild rubbertrees.

Ford’s was only one of a hundred projects that the junglevines have overgrown. The vast effort expended in the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad, which was to link Amazonas with Bolivia and the Pacific coast, though trains do occasionally run on it, has left little behind except legend. Stories of failure in face of the rainforest hang about every streetcorner in Manaus. The city’s history is of great plans gone awry. Even the building of the new airconditioned hotel, which was to have brought in the benefits of the international tourist trade, ended in the bankruptcy of the promoter. Already the new hotel wears the air of having seen better days.

Projects … Projects

In the bar and in the patio of the Hotel Amazonas, cooled by the forced draft from a large ventilating fan, men sit in their shirtsleeves and talk excitedly of the great future of the state of Amazonas. The old bogeys of malaria and yellow fever have been driven back up into the most distant tributaries. Hygiene will do the rest.

Some airline should buy this hotel and renovate it and channel the flow of tourists with money to spend into sport-fishing on the rivers, and exploration, so easy with proper motorboats, of the watery wilderness.

They rattle off lists of minerals and their locations: gold, nickel, hematite, manganese, tin, bauxite, tungsten. Companies are promoting the cultivation of the Brazil nut and the palms and other trees that produce vegetable oils. There are said to be a hundred and nineteen varieties susceptible of exploitation.

Agronomists are catching fire at the first rumors of a technical breakthrough on the production of fertilizers suitable for the special conditions of the tropical rainforest. Locked in certain crumbling formations of rock in the worndown mountain ranges of eastern Brazil there is said to be enough available minerals in a substance called biotite to revolutionize tropical agriculture. In northern Australia the experiment stations are turning under a nitrogenproducing plant named Indigofera that may solve the problem of nitrogen.

Agricultural colonies have been successful in the river valleys of Mato Grosso and Goiás. Why not turn the surplus population of the barren northeast into Amazonas? With proper farming and public health the merest corner of Amazonas could support a population equal to the present population of the entire nation.

While they talk they eat toasted Brazil nuts. Nothing better. Why not can them and ship them to New York and make a fortune?

The city of Manaus, when you walk around by day, does show a few signs of new construction. A new electric light plant, which is to operate on crude oil brought in from Venezuela and Peru, is about to go into operation to furnish muchneeded power and even light for the city streets.

The explanation of why this plant had to be bought entire was not without interest. A good deal of the component machinery could have been manufactured in Brazil, but the result of the laws passed by the federal congress seeking to insure the use of Brazilmade products was that if any item were bought in Brazil the whole inventory of things that had to be bought abroad: generators, various sorts of piping and tubing, copper wire and all the rest, would have had to be approved item by item by the interested government bureaus. Every purchase would be endlessly obstructed by the appropriate bureaucrats. The result would have been interminable delay. To buy an entire plant abroad only one authorization was necessary. A neat case of selfdefeating legislation.

A thoroughly uptodate factory newly installed produces laminated veneer woods. There German and Czechoslovakian machinery is powered by American furnaces. A nearby jutemill has just doubled its capacity. Each of these projects has brought in a group of foreign engineers to supervise the new installations. There aren’t enough Brazilian engineers, and those who are competent would rather work in the cosmopolitan regions of Rio and São Paulo. In spite of themselves the imported engineers catch the speculative fever.

A tall young Hungarian working on the generators at the electric light plant could talk of nothing but the bauxite and manganese he’s found on his wife’s ranch in Amapá at the northern mouth of the Amazon and his vast catches of fish, trolling up the Rio Negro north of Manaus, every afternoon after work.

The pleasantest part of Manaus is a region of gardens and candycolored villas which rambles among the hills that rise behind the old town. In these latitudes even the elevation of a couple of hundred feet above the river brings a noticeable freshness to the air. A new hardtop road extends between gardens, plantations of pineapple and sugarcane and shady mango groves, out into the sandy redsoiled uplands.

Since it’s a fine Sunday morning the road is full of small cars and families on bicycles or on foot headed out for the picnic grounds and swimming holes improvised wherever the road crosses a clear stream. Every rustcolored sandy beach is full of bathers, brown amid the vivid greens of mangoes and banana trees. We pass a nightclub where roulettewheels, supposed to be illegal in Brazil, spin undisturbed by the local authorities.

After the baths and the resorts, the road cuts through rolling hills planted with experimental groves of rubber trees grafted with new varieties imported from Africa and the Far East. Here, we are told, the present state governor, still hopeful in the face of the failure of the largescale experiments of the Ford Company years ago, is promoting a fresh effort to put Amazon rubber cultivation on a commercial basis.

Beyond the rubber plantations the homesteaders begin. Wherever a new road opens in Brazil a band of settlement spreads out along it. Here settlers are encouraged to build themselves houses and to clear small farms on six and a half acre tracts with a good wide frontage on the road. If the planting meets the requirements the settlers are supposed to get title to the land with the lapse of a year.

Clearing land in these parts is a rough business. We heard the same story from Iquitos on. Everything favors the growth of trees over other types of vegetation. Clearing a small patch is long and tedious, even with a bulldozer. It is doubtful whether it is worth the effort and expense. If, as in most cases, a man has only his own two arms and an axe and machete, about the best he can do is burn the underbrush and let the big trees lie where they fall. Grubbing with his machete or a long brushhook he’ll plant corn or manioc in the scorched loam. Chemical fertilizers are unobtainable and even if they could be had the types used in regions of moderate rainfall would wash away with the first tropical downpour. Often, after the tremendous labor of clearing, the patch will only yield one crop because whatever plantfoods there were in the soil will have been dissipated by the continual rains. The procedure is to let the land grow up after harvesting and to go to work to make another clearing.

The region we are going through this morning has, for Amazonas, better than average soil and a better than average climate. We find ourselves passing some flourishing plantations of corn, papaya and of the inevitable bushy manioc with its fivefingered redtinted leaves.

We notice a bristlebearded man walking out with a firm step down the center of the road. He wears a battered slouch hat. His clothes, all rags, are stained with the red color of the land. A long shotgun is slung over his shoulder. He makes no move to get out of the way of the car. It’s the car that has to swerve to get around him. “He’s a hunter,” says the stout citybred man who owns the car. “No struggling with unfriendly vegetation for him. He’ll shoot the animals and pick the wild fruits.” There’s a touch of awed admiration in his voice. “For weeks he’ll stay out in the forest alone, hunting game … The forest is his home.”

The surprise of the morning was when, in an open lot fringed with palms, we came upon a group of boys playing baseball. The ballplayers were the first sign we saw of a colony of fifty or sixty Japanese families settled here during the last three years. They have organized a cooperative under the management of a Japanese agronomist to grow black pepper. We began to see carefully weeded rows of staked pepper vines. The palmthatched huts began to take on an indefinable Japanese look. Men wearing conical straw hats were pushing light carts rigged with bicycle wheels. Each house had a vegetable patch and an occasional flowering vine.

The settlers’ houses, built on a framework of poles, lashed together in the local manner by jungle vines, and roofed and walled with palmleaf thatch, were hardly more than shelters against the rain and the sun, but a great neatness prevailed inside. Their tables and benches were hewn out of the local woods.

Everybody had a transistor radio. Their few utensils were cheap imports but shining clean. The kitchens had white enameled gas ranges fired by bottled propane gas trucked out from Manaus. The women were all smiles when we noticed how new they were.

A young man walked us around the cleantilled pepper vines. They grow on heavy stakes like polebeans. The foliage has a darker, glossier look. Once they start to bloom they keep on bearing the racemes of green shotlike peppers for a number of years. When we asked about fertilizers our friend answered with a certain embarrassmet that all they could get was the hulls of the castanha or Brazil nut, sold by the small factories that shell and pack the meats of this most characteristic of Amazonian products. Not much good but it was all that could be had.

When we were about to leave the Japanese picked a couple of the fragrant yellow melonlike fruits of the passionflower vine and insisted on our taking them as a present.

We were shown their school. The school is named for Ryoto Oyama.

Ryoto Oyama was the Japanese who, acting as a sort of opposite number to Henry Wickham, smuggled seed of the jute plant out of Bengal and introduced it in Brazil. Jute is now one of the principal crops of the region. The Japanese are popular in Amazonas.

Back in Manaus, at the exhibit put on by the Association of Commerce, the face of the man in charge lights up when I ask him about jute. The dollar value of jute as a cash crop is fast catching up with all the wild rubber, latex, and guttapercha products combined. Brazil nuts, veneer woods, vegetable oils, tropical fruits, pepper and guaraná roots and berries (the basis of the Brazilian soft drink), fish and chicle; he rattles off the export products.

Petroleum … he frowns when the word comes up.

He tells us that Petrobras, the Brazilian government corporation in charge of the oil industry, has two hundred and fifty prospectors in the field looking for oil. Nothing. He has been told that no results are to be expected till 1966. Meanwhile the local distillery has to depend on Peru and Venezuela and on an occasional shipment from the fardistant Brazilian field at Bahia.

Now jute. He is smiling again. It is suited to the soil. It is easy to cultivate and to process. The growing of jute will give Amazonas a breathing space while the exploitation of other products is being developed.

Like Iquitos, Manaus consists of two towns, the musclebound old city on its hills and a floating town which is the buying and selling center for the dwellers on the rivers and creeks for miles upstream and downstream. Fifty thousand people are said to live on the flutuantes, as they call the floating houses around Manaus. Since the stages of the river have a different schedule here than in the Peruvian region a thousand miles upstream, the water is high now. The rafts are all afloat.

A large bay downstream from the steamship wharves is full of anchored rafts with houses on them. No taxes. No difficulties with the police or shakedown from the politicians. Ample sanitation.

This floating city is more uptodate than the rustic port of Iquitos. There are warehouses with galvanized iron roofs, there are large grocerystores and hardwarestores, filling stations for motorboats and outboards. There is a goodsized clinic advertising the names of a number of doctors. There are repair-shops, warehouses of wholesale merchants who advertize for pelts and crocodile and snake skins, restaurants, cafés and bars, a barbershop.

Watermen, who skull small skiffs or row blue and green painted boats, take the place of taxicabs. They row standing, leaning forward on their oars. Canoes peddling hot coffee from raft to raft have romantic names like Star of the Dawn. A motorized coffee boat is labeled Café Jango, after the nickname of the President of the Republic.

The floating city has a thriving air that is lacking in dryland Manaus. Motor launches and small steamers crowded with passengers come and go. Canoes dart back and forth. Afloat you are free from the frustrating heat that acts like a leaden drag on every movement.

The Junction of the Waters

Invited for a fishing trip on an official cabin cruiser we rejoice in the coolness of the air over the moving water. The boat makes its own breeze. As he picks his way out through the skiffs and canoes towards the center of the river the man at the wheel points out people scooping up water in buckets. The dwellers on the flutuantes get their water from the middle of the river where it is reputed to be cleaner.

The waters of the Rio Negro really are black. The boat skims fast over the smooth lacquer surface. We are trolling with very large spoons on heavy nylon line. We are told that the river fish when they bite come big. This does not turn out to be the day.

There is a great deal to look at as we skirt the shore opposite the city. It is a day of blue sky and a thousand pale lavender-shadowed white blobs of cloud. The greens of the trees which stand kneedeep out of the dark water are incredibly varied. Palms of different shapes sprout out at all sorts of angles. There are misty thickets of bamboo and huge broad-leaved arboreal monsters and spindly saplings with fine pale-green foliage. One of the characteristics of the Amazon forest is the fantastic number of different species to be found in any patch of woodland. You hardly see the same tree twice.

From reeds and floating islands and fallen logs, herons rise, kingfishers, ducks of all sorts. The colors of a butterfly will catch the sun as it flutters out from the forest shadows. A clearing, banana leaves swaying in the wind, tall papayas lifting their clusters of green fruit above the everpresent underbrush of manioc will announce a dwelling, sometimes a shack of boards with a roof of rough shingles, but more often a mere shelter of poles thatched with palm. Always there’s a canoe. This is a population that lives by the river.

We leave the main stream of the river and plough through a network of narrow canals known as igarapés. Though there are differences in the style of boatbuilding and in the shape of their paddles, the people we pass are remarkably like the people we saw in riverside settlements a thousand miles upstream. There is a definite Amazonian type.

Here, if anything, the people seem poorer. Clothes are more ragged, children more naked, utensils more scanty. Sitting on top of the cabin as the boat chugs through the narrow watercourses is almost like visiting the people in their houses. Each house is open to inspection as the boat glides by. It is a life of total poverty; still the people have an independent air. Each house has its own canoes. The better off have outboards, fishnets hung to dry.

Longeared zebu cattle and waterbuffalo wade in distant drowned pastures. Through the more traveled igarapés steamboats ply, headed for distant settlements, towing behind them congeries of various craft. Cargoes are hidden from the sun by layers of large leaves.

In the pondlike head of one inlet, set around with big globular trees that give the effect of willows, we haul in our lines and ask a fisherman why we are not catching any fish.

High water, he answers immediately. The fish are feeding far inland in places where a boat like ours can never penetrate.

He is a tobaccocolored man with a wrinkled face and a long sharp nose jutting out from under the brim of his straw hat. He has a small neat canoe and a wellmade paddle. He paddles in the bow. Within easy reach he has a casting net, a couple of fishspears and a bow with long arrows. Beside them lie some coiled fishing lines and an antique shotgun. He controls his dugout canoe with hardly an effort of the arm.

Where is he going? “Fishing,” he says, with a flash of his eye, “or perhaps to hunt.” He spins the canoe around and heads for a narrow watercourse much too small for our big lumbering motor cruiser. With the air of being monarch of all he surveys he disappears among the trees.

We double back through another narrow passage. We skirt rough wharves and settlements. We explore vast lakelike stretches of water bordering on the Rio Solimoes where gulls circle as over the ocean. Suddenly we are speeding out from a point of land into the junction of two streams. The man at the wheel follows a foamy path of spinning eddies that stretches like a seam between the rivers. On one side is the buffcolored flood of the Solimoes, on the other the dense black flood of the Rio Negro. For a long distance the two waters churn together without mixing. The cruiser staggers from the force of the eddies.

“See,” cries the man at the wheel, “they don’t want to mix …” As he brings the cruiser around in a wide circle he gives a sweep of his hand to point out the wilderness of wide waters which dwarfs the receding forested banks as they melt into the horizon, “but when they mix they form the Amazon.”