Volume 2 — THE FORESTS OF THE AMAZON AND MADEIRA RIVERS.

FRANZ KELLER.

[The author of the following selection, with his father, was sent in 1867, by the Minister of Public Works at Rio Janeiro, to explore the Madeira, and to project a railroad along its banks where the rapids rendered navigation impossible. His observations during this journey are given in “The Amazon and Madeira Rivers,” from which we extract his remarks concerning the Brazilian forests.]

Everywhere the decomposing organisms serve as bases for new formations. No particle, however small, is ever lost in the great household of Nature; but nowhere is her restless activity so conspicuous as in the tropics, where the succession of vegetable decay and life is so much more rapid than it is in colder climes; and which will strike the reflecting student more especially in the wide, forest-clad valleys of tropical America, and on the Amazon and its affluents.

On the heights of the Cordillera the process is already at work. The waste of the mountain-slopes, broken off by rills and torrents, and carried by them into the main river, slowly drifts down-stream in the form of gravel-banks, until, scattered and rent asunder in a thousand ways, it finally takes permanent form as light-green islands, which are soon covered and protected with a dense coat of vegetation.

As every zone of geologic formation in the extensive valley adds its tribute, these banks are a kind of mineralogical collection, which shows samples of all the rocks on the river-banks, with the exception, perhaps, of light pumice-stone, the produce of the volcanoes of the Andes, which drifts down-stream in large pieces, and is highly prized by the Tapuia population (on the lower course) for sharpening and cleaning their weapons and tools. Even when not picked up by hunter or fisher, it is not lost. It will be arrested by some snag or projection of the shore, it will so get embedded in the newly-forming sediment, and thousands of years hence its silicic acid will afford the necessary material for the hard glassy bark of a bambusacea, or the sharp edge of a reed. When the currents are not strong enough to move the larger banks, they at least carry sand and earth with them, and deposit them as shoals or new alluvion at less exposed spots....

The undermined concave shores are sometimes a serious danger to the passing barque, as even the slight ripple of a canoe is sufficient to bring down the loosely overhanging earth, often covered with gigantic trunks. These concave sides, with their fallen trees and their clusters of sinking javary-palms, supported sometimes by only a tangled net-work of tough lianas, give to the scenery that peculiar character of primeval wildness which is so charming to foreigners.

When one has climbed up the steep shore, often forming huge terrace-like elevations, and has safely passed through a labyrinth of interwoven roots and creepers into the interior of the forest, which is getting freer from underwood at some distance from the river, he is oppressed with the sensation of awe and wonder felt by man on entering one of the venerable edifices of antiquity.

A mysterious twilight encompasses us, which serves to intensify the radiance of the occasional sunbeam as it falls on a glossy palm-leaf, or on a large bunch of purple orchid-flowers. Splendid trunks, some of them from twenty to thirty feet in diameter, rise like so many pillars supporting the dense green vault of foliage; and every variety of tall, graceful palms, spare and bushy, and bearing heavy berries of bright yellow or red, struggle to catch a glimpse of the light, from which they are shut out by the neighboring giants, of which the figueira (or wild fig-tree) is one of the most striking, in the dimensions of its crown and stem, and in the strange shape of its roots, which project like huge outworks. These seem to grow in all directions, forming props, stays, and cross-bars wherever they are wanted, just as if the whole were a soft plastic mass, the sole purpose of which was to supply, with a minimum of material, as much stability as possible to the trunk, whose wood is of extreme softness and whose roots are not deep. The pachiuba-palm (Iriartea exorhiza) and some species of Cecropiæ exhibit other extravagances in their roots. They appear as if standing on stilts, the real trunks only beginning at eight or ten feet above ground.

But, more than all, it is the profusion of orchids and Bromeliæ that excites our admiration. These bright children of the tropics envelop with dense foliage as well the fallen and mouldering trunks as those yet upstanding in full vigor and bloom, thus forming hanging gardens of astounding magnificence, which reveal leaves and flowers of the most irregular shapes and colors. Everywhere, on the branches and on the ground, and even from out the fissures of the bare rock, light ferns and rich moss spring up and clothe the decaying trunks with fresh green. Of mosses and ferns, especially tree-ferns, we found a greater exuberance and a larger variety, in species as well as in individuals, in the Southern provinces of the empire, São Paulo and Paraná; but for splendid palms and gigantic dicotyledons the North is decidedly the richer of the two.

Without the aid of the pencil it is indeed scarcely possible to give an adequate idea of the magnificence of this vegetation, especially of the manner in which the different forms are grouped. We may see, it is true, in our own hot-houses, well-trimmed palms, beautiful orchids with their abnormal blossoms, and Aroideæ with their bright, sappy, sometimes regularly perforated, leaves; but how different is this from the virgin forest, wherein Nature, undisturbed by man, has created her own prodigies, and where no narrow pots separate her children from the maternal soil, and where no dim roof of glass intervenes between them and the blue ether! Nor, in our carefully tended hot-houses, is the eye ever gratified with such agreeable contrasts as are afforded by the silver-gray and rust-brown tints of the decayed leaf of the palm or the fern-tree, or the black bark of the rotting trunk, with the blazing scarlet of some heliconia blossom. How difficult it must be to give to every plant, especially to orchids, the exact quantity of light, warmth, and moisture it requires, can be understood only by those who have seen clusters of them hidden in the deep shade of the tree-crowns, while others are exposed to the scorching rays of the sun in the vicinity of a river or in some clearer part of the forest; some species thriving on the bare rock almost, and others clinging fast with their white rootlets to the moist rotting bark of a tree....

But of far greater importance to the half-civilized riverines than either palms or orchids, for whose beauties they have no eye, are the cacao and the caoutchouc-tree (Siphonia elastica), products of the virgin forest essential to the future prosperity of the whole country.

Although India contributes to the supply of caoutchouc, the precious resin which is transformed into a thousand different shapes every year in the factories of Europe and North America, and sent to the ends of the earth, it cannot compete with Brazil, which takes the first place among the rubber-producing countries, in respect as well of the vastness of its export of the material as of its superior quality.

On the shores of the Amazon its production, it is true, has already been diminished by unreasonable treatment of the trees; the idea of replacing the old ones by young saplings never having presented itself, apparently, to the mind of the indolent population; but the seringaes, or woods of rubber-trees, on the banks of the Madeira, the Purús, and other tributaries of the main river, still continue to furnish extraordinary quantities of it. The province of Amazon alone exports more than fifty thousand arrobas (one million six hundred thousand pounds) yearly, while the total of the exports of the whole basin slightly exceeds four hundred thousand arrobas, or twelve million eight hundred thousand pounds, per annum....

Unfortunately, there has not been until now the slightest attempt made to cultivate this useful tree; and all the caoutchouc exported from Pará is still obtained from the original seringa groves. The trees of course suffer, as they naturally would under the best of treatment, from the repeated tapping and drawing-off of their sap, and the rubber collectors, therefore, must look about for new groves of the tree in the unexplored valleys of the more distant interior.

The planting of the Siphonia elastica would be a more profitable investment, as it yields the precious milk in the comparatively short space of twenty or twenty-five years; but, under the combined influence of the indolence of the Mestitzoes and the shortsightedness of the government, measures to that end will be adopted and carried into effect only when the rubber exportation shall have diminished with the destruction of the trees, and when European and North American manufacturers shall have found out a more or less appropriate substitute for the too costly resin.

Near the Praia de Tamanduá we acquainted ourselves with all the particulars respecting the collection and preparation of the caoutchouc at the cottage of a Bolivian seringueiro, Don Domingo Leigue. As I have already stated, the Siphonia grows, or at least thrives, only on a soil wherein its stem is annually submerged by the floods to the height of three feet or more. The best ground for it, therefore, is the igapó, the lowest and most recent deposit of the river; and there, in the immediate vicinity of the seringaes, may be seen the low thatches of the gatherers’ huts, wretched hovels mostly, rendered tenantable during the inundations by the device of raising the floors on wooden piles of seven feet height, in which the canoe, the seringueiro’s indispensable horse, also finds a protected harbor. Unenviable truly must be the life of the happy proprietor, who has nothing to do in the seringal during the wet season, and who then has ample leisure to calculate exactly the intervals between his fits of ague, and to let himself be devoured by carapanás, piums, motúcas, and mucuims; under which euphonious names are known some of the most terrible of insect pests.

Narrow paths lead from the cottage, through the dense underwood, to each separate tree; and, as soon as the dry season sets in, the inmate of the palace just described betakes himself with his hatchet into the seringal, to cut little holes in the bark. The milk-white sap immediately begins to exude into pieces of bamboo tied below, over little clay cups set under the gashes to prevent their trickling down the stems. The collector travels thus from trunk to trunk; and, to facilitate operations, on his return visit he pours the contents of the bamboos into a large calabash provided with liana straps, which he empties at home into one of those large turtle-shells so auxiliary to housekeeping in these regions, serving as they do for troughs, basins, etc.

Without any delay he sets about the smoking process, as the resinous parts will separate after a while, and the quality of the rubber so become inferior. An earthen jar, without bottom and with a narrow neck, is set by way of chimney over a fire of dry urucury, or uauassú palm-nuts, whose smoke alone, strange to say, has the effect of instantly coagulating the caoutchouc sap, which, in this state, greatly resembles rich cow’s milk. The workman, sitting beside this “chimney,” through which roll dense clouds of a smothering white smoke, from a small calabash pours a little of the milk on a sort of light wooden shovel, always careful, by proper management of the latter, to distribute it evenly over the surface. Thrusting the shovel into the thick smoke over the opening of the jar, he turns it several times to and fro with great rapidity, when the milk is seen to consolidate and to take a grayish-yellow tinge.

Thus he puts layer upon layer, until at last the caoutchouc on both sides of the wood has reached about an inch in thickness, when he thinks the “plancha” ready. Cutting it on one side, he takes it off the shovel and suspends it in the sun to dry, as there is always some water between the several layers, which should, if possible, evaporate. A good workman is thus able to prepare five or six pounds of solid seringa in an hour. The plancha, from its initial color of a clear silver-gray, turns shortly into a yellow, and finally becomes the well-known dark brown of the rubber, such as it is exported.

The more uniform, the denser and freer of bubbles, the whole mass is found to be, the better is its quality and the higher the price it fetches. Almost double the value is obtained for the first-rate article over that of the most inferior quality, the so-called sernamby or cabeça de negro (negro’s head); which is nothing but the drops collected at the foot of the trees, with the remains of the milk scraped out of the bottoms of the calabashes. The rubber of India is said to be much like this sernamby, and, like it, to be mixed with sand and small pieces of bark. By way of testing the quality, every plancha is cut through again at Pará; by which means discovery is made, not only of the bubbles, but also of any adulteration that might be effected with the milk of the mangaba, that fine plant with dark glossy leaves, now found so often in European saloons under the erroneous name of rubber-plant....

The wild cacao, with its large lancet-shaped hanging leaves, and its cucumber-like fruit springing directly from the stem, is one of the characteristic features of the virgem [or solid soil] on which it often forms dense thickets, which are all the more impenetrable that the boughs—exhibiting frequently at the same time the small reddish flowers and the ripe golden fruit, in which the seeds lie embedded in a sweet white marrow—bend to the ground and there take root again.

But the india-rubber and the cacao are not the only treasures worth collecting in these forests. Even now the export of the Pará nuts, the fruit of the Bertholletia excelsa, yields an annual revenue of two hundred thousand dollars; and the copaiba oil and the urucú, the seeds of the Bixa orellana, used for dyeing, about one hundred thousand dollars. These sums seem small enough, it is true, but there are perhaps a hundred times those values of the rich-flavored nuts rotting unheeded in the forests, and above a score of other rich oily seeds, at present collected only for the use of the natives, not to mention several resins which yield the finest varnishes, plants giving the most brilliant hues, and others with fibres that would serve not only for the finest weavings, but also for the strongest ropes; besides about forty of the most indispensable drugs, all which might become most valuable articles of export....

Notwithstanding the fertility of tropical vegetation, I doubt whether any other part of the world, in the same latitude, can offer as great a number of useful plants as does the Amazon Valley; and now, when all-transforming steam is about to open up to us this rich emporium, European industry should take advantage of the hitherto neglected treasures. What might not be done with the fibres, some of which surpass our hemp and flax in all respects? The curauá, for example, a sort of wild pine-apple, gives a delicate transparent flax of a silky lustre, such as is used in the Philippine Islands, on a large scale, it appears. It is sold under the name of palha at Rio de Janeiro. The tucum and the javary would make excellent ropes, cords, nets, etc., well calculated to resist moisture and rot; and the piassaba, the murity, etc., would readily supply solid brushes, brooms, hammocks, hats, baskets, mats; while the snow-white bast of others would give excellent paper.

The lianas or cipós of these countries are, besides their minor uses, quite indispensable to the half-civilized natives for the construction of their light cottages, taking the place (as they do) of our nails and cramp-irons, beams, posts, and rafters. The whole palm-leaf roof is fastened, and artificially interwoven and intertwined, with tough creepers of nearly an inch thickness....

In the hot lowlands of the Amazon, in the shade of endless forest, there is many an herb of mysterious virtue, as yet known only to wild Indian tribes, while the fame of others has already spread over the ocean. Who has not heard of the urary, or curare, the quick arrow-poison which, in the hands of clever physiologists and physicians, promises not only to become a valuable drug, but to give us interesting disclosures on the activity of the nerves?

The wondrous tales of former travellers regarding the preparation of this urary have been rectified long ago. The venom of snakes is not used for it, but the juice of the bruised stems and leaves of several kinds of strychnos and apocyneas is simply boiled over a coal fire, mixed with tobacco-juice and capsicum (Spanish pepper), and thickened with the sticky milk of some Euphorbiacea to a hard mass. This manipulation, moreover, is not undertaken by the old squaws of the tribe, devoting themselves to a painful death thereby, as the old stories ran, but, as there is no danger whatever, by the young wives of the warriors, who look upon it as part of their household duties, or by the men themselves. There are about eight or ten different poisons of similar, but not identical, composition and preparation, of which the urary of the Macusi Indians, and the curare, from Venezuela and New Granada, are considered the most powerful.

This dark-brown, pitchy substance, usually kept in little earthen pots, is lightly spread over the points of the weapons,—their long arrows, their light spears, and the thin wooden shafts, of about a foot long, which they shoot through immense blow-tubes (sarabacanas). Immediately upon the diffusion in the blood of the slightest portion of the poison, the limbs, one by one, refuse to work, as if overcome with torpor, while the mind apparently retains its activity until death ensues, which it does in a few minutes’ time, from palsy of the lungs. It is strange that only those nerves are affected which regulate the movements depending on our own will, whereas those movements we cannot control—the beating of the heart, for example—continue unaltered to the very last. Experiments made by French physicians upon animals have shown that, if the lungs are artificially kept in activity for several hours, the poison will be rejected by natural means, and no bad consequences will ensue. Of late the principal objection to the employment of the urary in medicine—its unequal strength—has been completely overcome by the effective alkaloid—the curarin—being extracted. This is about twenty times as powerful as the urary, and has been used successfully in the treatment of tetanus. The Indians shoot birds and monkeys, which they wish to tame, with very weak curare, rousing them from the lethargy which overpowers them with large doses of salt or sugar-juice; and this treatment is said to be very effective, also, in the reduction of their wildness....

The guraná, prepared from the fruit of the Paullinia sorbilis, is a hard, chocolate-brown mass, of a slightly bitter taste, and of no smell whatever. It is usually sold in cylindric pieces of from ten inches to a foot in length, in which the half-bruised almond-like seeds are still distinguishable; the more homogeneous and the harder the mass, the better is its quality. To render it eatable, or rather drinkable, it is rasped as fine as possible on the rough, bony roof of the mouth of the Sudis gigas (pirá-rucú), and mixed with a little sugar and water. A teaspoonful in a cup of warm water is said to be an excellent remedy in slight attacks of ague.

The taste of this beverage, reminding one slightly of almonds, is very palatable; still, it scarcely accounts for the passionate liking entertained for it by the inhabitants of the greater part of South America. It must be the stimulating effects of the paullinin it contains (an alkaloid like caffeine and theïne) that render it so indispensable to those who have been accustomed to it. All the boats that come lightly freighted with ipecacuanha and deer- or tiger-hides, from Mato Grosso down the Arinos and the Tapajoz, in face of the considerable cataracts and rapids of the latter, take their full loads of guaraná at Santarem; and the heavy boats of the Madeira also convey large quantities of it to Bolivia; for at Cuyabá, as well as at Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Cochabamba, there are many who cannot do without their guaraná, for which they often have to pay thirty francs the pound, and who prefer all the rigors of fasting to abstinence from their favorite beverage. On the other hand, the mestizo population on the Amazon, where it is prepared on a large scale by the half-civilized tribes of the Mauhés and Mundurucús and sold at about three francs the pound, are not so passionately attached to it; they rather take coffee and a sort of coarse chocolate, which they manufacture for themselves.