Part 11 (1/2)

The Caiarara owes its name in the Tupi language, macaw or large- headed (Acain, head and Arara macaw), to the disproportionate size of the head compared with the rest of the body. It is very frequently kept as a pet in houses of natives. I kept one myself for about a year, which accompanied me in my voyages and became very familiar, coming to me always on wet nights to share my blanket. It is a most restless creature, but is not playful like most of the American monkeys; the restlessness of its disposition seeming to arise from great nervous irritability and discontent.

The anxious, painful, and changeable expression of its countenance, and the want of purpose in its movements, betray this. Its actions are like those of a wayward child; it does not seem happy even when it has plenty of its favourite food, bananas; but will leave its own meal to s.n.a.t.c.h the morsels out of the hands of its companions. It differs in these mental traits from its nearest kindred, for another common Cebus, found in the same parts of the forest, the Prego monkey (Cebus cirrhifer?), is a much quieter and better-tempered animal; it is full of tricks, but these are generally of a playful character.

The Caiarara keeps the house in a perpetual uproar where it is kept-- when alarmed, or hungry, or excited by envy, it screams piteously; it is always, however, making some noise or other, often s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up its mouth and uttering a succession of loud notes resembling a whistle. My little pet, when loose, used to run after me, supporting itself for some distance on its hind legs, without, however, having been taught to do it. He offended me greatly one day, by killing, in one of his jealous fits, another and much choicer pet--the nocturnal owl-faced monkey (Nyctipithecus trivirgatus). Someone had given this a fruit, which the other coveted, so the two got to quarrelling. The Nyctipithecus fought only with its paws, clawing out and hissing like a cat; the other soon obtained the mastery, and before I could interfere, finished his rival by cracking its skull with his teeth. Upon this, I got rid of him.

On recrossing the river to Aveyros in the evening, a pretty little parrot fell from a great height headlong into the water near the boat, having dropped from a flock which seemed to be fighting in the air. One of the Indians secured it for me, and I was surprised to find the bird uninjured. There had probably been a quarrel about mates, resulting in our little stranger being temporarily stunned by a blow on the head from the beak of a jealous comrade. The species was the Conurus guianensis, called by the natives Maracana-- the plumage green, with a patch of scarlet under the wings. I wished to keep the bird alive and tame it, but all our efforts to reconcile it to captivity were vain; it refused food, bit everyone who went near it, and damaged its plumage in its exertions to free itself. My friends in Aveyros said that this kind of parrot never became domesticated. After trying nearly a week I was recommended to lend the intractable creature to an old Indian woman, living in the village, who was said to be a skillful bird-tamer. In two days she brought it back almost as tame as the familiar love-birds of our aviaries. I kept my little pet for upwards of two years; it learned to talk pretty well, and was considered quite a wonder as being a bird usually so difficult of domestication. I do not know what arts the old woman used-- Captain Antonio said she fed it with her saliva. The chief reason why almost all animals become so wonderfully tame in the houses of the natives is, I believe, their being treated with uniform gentleness, and allowed to run at large about the rooms.

Our Maracana used to accompany us sometimes in our rambles, one of the lads carrying it on his head. One day, in the middle of a long forest road, it was missed, having clung probably to an overhanging bough and escaped into the thicket without the boy perceiving it. Three hours afterwards, on our return by the same path, a voice greeted using a colloquial tone as we pa.s.sed-- ”Maracana!” We looked about for some time, but could not see anything, until the word was repeated with emphasis-- ”Maracana- a!” When we espied the little truant half concealed in the foliage of a tree, he came down and delivered himself up, evidently as much rejoiced at the meeting as we were.

After I had obtained the two men promised, stout young Indians, seventeen or eighteen years of age, one named Ricardo and the other Alberto, I paid a second visit to the western side of the river in my own canoe; being determined, if possible, to obtain specimens of the White Cebus. We crossed over first to the mission village, Santa Cruz, which consists of thirty or forty wretched-looking mud huts, closely built together in three straight ugly rows on a high gravelly bank. The place was deserted, with the exception of two or three old men and women and a few children. A narrow belt of wood runs behind the village; beyond this is an elevated, barren campo with a clayey and gravelly soil. To the south, the coast country is of a similar description; a succession of scantily-wooded hills, bare gra.s.sy s.p.a.ces, and richly-timbered hollows. We traversed forest and campo in various directions during three days without meeting with monkeys, or indeed with anything that repaid us the time and trouble. The soil of the district appeared too dry; at this season of the year I had noticed, in other parts of the country, that mammals and birds resorted to the more humid areas of forest; we therefore proceeded to explore carefully the low and partly swampy tract along the coast to the north of Santa Cruz.

We spent two days in this way landing at many places, and penetrating a good distance in the interior. Although unsuccessful with regard to the White Cebus, the time was not wholly lost, as I added several small birds of species new to my collection. On the second evening we surprised a large flock, composed of about fifty individuals, of a curious eagle with a very long and slender hooked beak, the Rostrhamus hamatus. They were perched on the bushes which surrounded a shallow lagoon, separated from the river by a belt of floating gra.s.s; my men said they fed on toads and lizards found at the margins of pools. They formed a beautiful sight as they flew up and wheeled about at a great height in the air. We obtained only one specimen.

Before returning to Aveyros, we paid another visit to the Jacare inlet-- leading to Captain Antonio's cattle farm, for the sake of securing further specimens of the many rare and handsome insects found there-- landing at the port of one of the settlers. The owner of the house was not at home, and the wife, a buxom young woman, a dark mameluca, with clear though dark complexion and fine rosy cheeks, was preparing, in company with another stout- built Amazon, her rod and lines to go out fis.h.i.+ng for the day's dinner. It was now the season for Tucunares, and Senora Joaquina showed us the fly baits used to take this kind of fish, which she had made with her own hands of parrots' feathers. The rods used are slender bamboos, and the lines made from the fibres of pine- apple leaves. It is not very common for the Indian and half-caste women to provide for themselves in the way these spirited dames were doing, although they are all expert paddlers, and very frequently cross wide rivers in their frail boats without the aid of men. It is possible that parties of Indian women, seen travelling alone in this manner, may have given rise to the fable of a nation of Amazons, invented by the first Spanish explorers of the country.

Senora Joaquina invited me and Jose to a Tucunare dinner for the afternoon, and then shouldering their paddles and tucking up their skirts, the two dusky fisherwomen marched down to their canoe. We sent the two Indians into the woods to cut palm-leaves to mend the thatch of our cuberta, while Jose and I rambled through the woods which skirted the campo. On our return, we found a most bountiful spread in the house of our hostess. A spotless white cloth was laid on the mat, with a plate for each guest and a pile of fragrant, newly-made farinha by the side of it. The boiled Tucunares were soon taken from the kettles and set before us. I thought the men must be happy husbands who owned such wives as these. The Indian and mameluco women certainly do make excellent managers; they are more industrious than the men, and most of them manufacture farinha for sale on their own account, their credit always standing higher with the traders on the river than that of their male connections. I was quite surprised at the quant.i.ty of fish they had taken there being sufficient for the whole party-- which included several children, two old men from a neighbouring hut, and my Indians. I made our good-natured entertainers a small present of needles and sewing- cotton, articles very much prized, and soon after we reembarked, and again crossed the river to Aveyros.

August 2nd--Left Aveyros, having resolved to ascend a branch river, the Cupari, which enters the Tapajos about eight miles above this village, instead of going forward along the main stream. I should have liked to visit the settlements of the Mundurucu tribe which lie beyond the first cataract of the Tapajos, if it had been compatible with the other objects I had in view. But to perform this journey a lighter canoe than mine would have been necessary, and six or eight Indian paddlers, which in my case it was utterly impossible to obtain. There would be, however, an opportunity of seeing this fine race of people on the Cupari, as a horde was located towards the head waters of this stream. The distance from Aveyros to the last civilised settlement on the Tapajos, Itaituba, is about forty miles. The falls commence a short distance beyond this place. Ten formidable cataracts or rapids then succeed each other at intervals of a few miles, the chief of which are the Coaita, the Bubure, the Salto Grande (about thirty feet high), and the Montanha. The canoes of Cuyaba tradesmen which descend annually to Santarem are obliged to be unloaded at each of these, and the cargoes carried by land on the backs of Indians, while the empty vessels are dragged by ropes over the obstruction. The Cupari was described to me as flowing through a rich, moist clayey valley covered with forests and abounding in game; while the banks of the Tapajos beyond Aveyros were barren sandy campos, with ranges of naked or scantily-wooded hills, forming a kind of country which I had always found very unproductive in Natural History objects in the dry season, which had now set in.

We entered the mouth of the Cupari on the evening of the following day (August 3rd). It was not more than a hundred yards wide, but very deep: we found no bottom in the middle with a line of eight fathoms. The banks were gloriously wooded, the familiar foliage of the cacao growing abundantly amongst the ma.s.s of other trees, reminding me of the forests of the main Amazons. We rowed for five or six miles, generally in a south-easterly direction, although the river had many abrupt bends, and stopped for the night at a settler's house, situated on a high bank, accessible only by a flight of rude wooden steps fixed in the clayey slope.

The owners were two brothers, half-breeds, who, with their families, shared the large roomy dwelling; one of them was a blacksmith, and we found him working with two Indian lads at his forge in an open shed under the shade of mango trees. They were the sons of a Portuguese immigrant who had settled here forty years previously, and married a Mundurucu woman. He must have been a far more industrious man than the majority of his countrymen who emigrate to Brazil nowadays, for there were signs of former extensive cultivation at the back of the house in groves of orange, lemon, and coffee trees, and a large plantation of cacao occupied the lower grounds.

The next morning one of the brothers brought me a beautiful opossum, which had been caught in the fowl-house a little before sunrise. It was not so large as a rat, and had soft brown fur, paler beneath and on the face, with a black stripe on each cheek.

This made the third species of marsupial rat I had so far obtained-- but the number of these animals is very considerable in Brazil, where they take the place of the shrews of Europe; shrew mice and, indeed, the whole of the insectivorous order of mammals, being entirely absent from Tropical America. One kind of these rat-like opossums is aquatic, and has webbed feet. The terrestrial species are nocturnal in their habits, sleeping during the day in hollow trees, and coming forth at night to prey on birds in their roosting places. It is very difficult to rear poultry in this country on account of these small opossums, scarcely a night pa.s.sing, in some parts, in which the fowls are not attacked by them.

August 5th.--The river reminds me of some parts of the Jaburu channel, being hemmed in by two walls of forest rising to the height of at least a hundred feet, and the outlines of the trees being concealed throughout by a dense curtain of leafy creepers.

The impression of vegetable profusion and overwhelming luxuriance increases at every step. The deep and narrow valley of the Cupari has a moister climate than the banks of the Tapajos. We have now frequent showers, whereas we left everything parched up by the sun at Aveyros.

After leaving the last sitio we advanced about eight miles, and then stopped at the house of Senor Antonio Malagueita, a mameluco settler, whom we had been recommended to visit. His house and outbuildings were extensive, the grounds well weeded, and the whole wore an air of comfort and well-being which is very uncommon in this country. A bank of indurated white clay sloped gently up from the tree-shaded port to the house, and beds of kitchen herbs extended on each side, with (rare sight!) rose and jasmine trees in full bloom. Senor Antonio, a rather tall middle- aged man, with a countenance beaming with good nature, came down to the port as soon as we anch.o.r.ed. I was quite a stranger to him, but he had heard of my coming, and seemed to have made preparations. I never met with a heartier welcome. On entering the house, the wife, who had more of the Indian tint and features than her husband, was equally warm and frank in her greeting.

Senor Antonio had spent his younger days at Para, and had acquired a profound respect for Englishmen. I stayed here two days. My host accompanied me in my excursions; in fact, his attentions, with those of his wife, and the host of relatives of all degrees who const.i.tuted his household, were quite troublesome, as they left me not a moment's privacy from morning till night.

We had, together, several long and successful rambles along a narrow pathway which extended several miles into the forest. I here met with a new insect pest, one which the natives may be thankful is not spread more widely over the country: it was a large brown fly of the Tabanidae family (genus Pangonia), with a proboscis half an inch long and sharper than the finest needle.

It settled on our backs by twos and threes at a time, and p.r.i.c.ked us through our thick cotton s.h.i.+rts, making us start and cry out with the sudden pain. I secured a dozen or two as specimens. As an instance of the extremely confined ranges of certain species, it may be mentioned that I did not find this insect in any other part of the country except along half a mile or so of this gloomy forest road.

We were amused at the excessive and almost absurd tameness of a fine Mutum or Cura.s.sow turkey, that ran about the house. It was a large glossy-black species (the Mitu tuberosa), having an orange- coloured beak, surmounted by a bean-shaped excrescence of the same hue. It seemed to consider itself as one of the family: attending all the meals, pa.s.sing from one person to another round the mat to be fed, and rubbing the sides of its head in a coaxing way against their cheeks or shoulders. At night it went to roost on a chest in a sleeping-room beside the hammock of one of the little girls to whom it seemed particularly attached (regularlyfollowing her wherever she went about the grounds). I found this kind of Cura.s.sow bird was very common in the forest of the Cupari; but it is rare on the Upper Amazons, where an allied species, which has a round instead of a bean-shaped waxen excrescence on the beak (Crax globicera), is the prevailing kind.

These birds in their natural state never descend from the tops of the loftiest trees, where they live in small flocks and build their nests. The Mitu tuberosa lays two rough-sh.e.l.led, white eggs; it is fully as large a bird as the common turkey, but the flesh when cooked is drier and not so well flavoured. It is difficult to find the reason why these superb birds have not been reduced to domestication by the Indians, seeing that they so readily become tame. The obstacle offered by their not breeding in confinement, which is probably owing to their arboreal habits, might perhaps be overcome by repeated experiment; but for this the Indians probably had not sufficient patience or intelligence.

The reason cannot lie in their insensibility to the value of such birds, for the common turkey, which has been introduced into the country, is much prized by them.

We had an unwelcome visitor while at anchor in the port of Antonio Malagueita. I was awakened a little after midnight, as I lay in my little cabin, by a heavy blow struck at the sides of the canoe close to my head, which was succeeded by the sound of a weighty body plunging into the water. I got up; but all was again quiet, except the cackle of fowls in our hen-coop, which hung over the side of the vessel about three feet from the cabin door.

I could find no explanation of the circ.u.mstance, and, my men being all ash.o.r.e, I turned in again and slept until morning. I then found my poultry loose about the canoe, and a large rent in the bottom of the hen-coop, which was about two feet from the surface of the water-- a couple of fowls were missing. Senor Antonio said the depredator was a Sucuruju (the Indian name for the Anaconda, or great water serpent--Eunectes murinus), which had for months past been haunting this part of the river, and had carried off many ducks and fowls from the ports of various houses. I was inclined to doubt the fact of a serpent striking at its prey from the water, and thought an alligator more likely to be the culprit, although we had not yet met with alligators in the river.

Some days afterwards, the young men belonging to the different sitios agreed together to go in search of the serpent. They began in a systematicmanner, forming two parties, each embarked in three or four canoes, and starting from points several miles apart, whence they gradually approximated, searching all the little inlets on both sides the river. The reptile was found at last, sunning itself on a log at the mouth of a muddy rivulet, and despatched with harpoons. I saw it the day after it was killed; it was not a very large specimen, measuring only eighteen feet nine inches in length, and sixteen inches in circ.u.mference at the widest part of the body. I measured skins of the Anaconda afterwards, twenty-one feet in length and two feet in girth. The reptile has a most hideous appearance, owing to its being very broad in the middle and tapering abruptly at both ends. It is very abundant in some parts of the country; nowhere more so than in the Lago Grande, near Santarem, where it is often seen coiled up in the corners of farmyards, and is detested for its habit of carrying off poultry, young calves, or whatever animal it can get within reach of.

At Ega, a large Anaconda was once near making a meal of a young lad about ten years of age, belonging to one of my neighbours.

The father and his son went, as was their custom, a few miles up the Teffe to gather wild fruit, landing on a sloping sandy sh.o.r.e, where the boy was left to mind the canoe while the man entered the forest. The beaches of the Teffe form groves of wild guava and myrtle trees, and during most months of the year are partly overflown by the river. While the boy was playing in the water under the shade of these trees, a huge reptile of this species stealthily wound its coils around him, unperceived until it was too late to escape. His cries brought the father quickly to the rescue, who rushed forward, and seizing the Anaconda boldly by the head, tore his jaws asunder. There appears to be no doubt that this formidable serpent grows to an enormous bulk, and lives to a great age, for I heard of specimens having been killed which measured forty-two feet in length, or double the size of the largest I had an opportunity to examine. The natives of the Amazons country universally believe in the existence of a monster water-serpent, said to be many score fathoms in length and which appears successively in different parts of the river. They call it the Mai d'agoa--the mother, or spirit, of the water. This fable, which was doubtless suggested by the occasional appearance of Sucurujus of unusually large size, takes a great variety of forms, and the wild legends form the subject of conversation amongst old and young, over the wood fires in lonely settlements.

August 6th and 7th--On leaving the sitio of Antonio Malagueita we continued our way along the windings of the river, generally in a southeast and south-southeast direction, but sometimes due north, for about fifteen miles, when we stopped at the house of one Paulo Christo, a mameluco whose acquaintance I had made at Aveyros. Here we spent the night and part of the next day, doing in the morning a good five hours' work in the forest, accompanied by the owner of the place. In the afternoon of the 7th, we were again under way; the river makes a bend to the east-northeast for a short distance above Paulo Christo's establishment, and then turns abruptly to the southwest, running from that direction about four miles. The hilly country of the interior then commences, the first token of it being a magnificently-wooded bluff, rising nearly straight from the water to a height of about 250 feet. The breadth of the stream hereabout was not more than sixty yards, and the forest a.s.sumed a new appearance from the abundance of the Urucuri palm, a species which has a n.o.ble crown of broad fronds with symmetrical rigid leaflets.

We reached, in the evening, the house of the last civilised settler on the river, Senor Joao (John) Aracu, a wiry, active fellow and capital hunter, whom I wished to make a friend of and persuade to accompany me to the Mundurucu village and the falls of the Cupari, some forty miles further up the river.I stayed at the sitio of John Aracu until the 19th, and again, in descending, spent fourteen days at the same place. The situation was most favourable for collecting the natural products of the district.

The forest was not crowded with underwood, and pathways led through it for many miles and in various directions. I could make no use here of our two men as hunters, so, to keep them employed while Jose and I worked daily in the woods, I set them to make a montaria under John Aracu's directions. The first day a suitable tree was found for the sh.e.l.l of the boat, of the kind called Itauba amarello, the yellow variety of the stonewood. They felled it, and shaped out of the trunk a log nineteen feet in length; this they dragged from the forest, with the help of my host's men, over a road they had previously made with cylindrical pieces of wood acting as rollers. The distance was about half a mile, and the ropes used for drawing the heavy load were tough lianas cut from the surrounding trees. This part of the work occupied about a week: the log had then to be hollowed out, which was done with strong chisels through a slit made down the whole length.