When he was quite a young man Edison failed to get to Brazil for the same reason that I had failed to get home from Rio—his ship did not sail. He had journeyed as far as New Orleans in quest of adventure, and before another chance came he met an old Spanish wanderer who advised him by all means to remain in the United States. It would probably be difficult to write on one page what humanity owes that unknown Spaniard. Later, when his inventions had begun to make him world famous, the former trainboy sent a man to search all the Amazon region for materials to be used in his experiments—and it was our privilege to take the finished product back to the land which the inventor himself had never reached in person.

The Brasil is one of the three smaller and older boats of the government line—which is the reason we had much more space in our two staterooms and considerably better attendance, for these boats are not popular with “deadhead” politicians and their families. The cabin passenger list was made up of the usual conglomeration of every human color, nationality, social and moral standing, from priests to several of the most repulsive old adventuresses—treated outwardly with complete equality even by mothers of corruptible daughters—from clean-cut young Englishmen to licentious, shifty-eyed Brazilian mulattoes. But the real sight was the steerage quarters on the three decks in the nose of the ship. Here men, women, and children—the thirty-four latest refugees from the interior among them—bound for the rubber-fields were so packed together that individual movement was impossible. Such a network of hammocks—above, across, under, over one another, the bottom of one sleeper resting on the belly of his neighbor below, scantily clad women crisscrossing men who had discarded all but a single short garment—as one could not have believed possible filled all the space, disputing it with the animals and fowls the ship carried as food. Sheep and pigs wandered among the no less frankly natural passengers; six zebu bulls on their way to improve the native stock at the mouth of the Amazon occupied stalls in the midst of the turmoil. One venturesome fellow had as a last resort hung his hammock from the roof above these animals, so that whenever one of them moved he was lifted hammock and all. There was a very exact description of the scene in the Cearense novel “O Paroara” with which I was whiling away my time, and as that was published sixteen years before, conditions have evidently long been the same.

Early in the afternoon of the second day we picked up a pilot along the sandy coast and went over a sandbar into the wide bay of Tutoya, port of the State of Piauhy, only a little point of which touches the sea. I had at one time planned to go up the Parnahyba River to Therezina, the capital, but inquiry proved that this would not be financially advantageous, so that I contented myself with this brief glimpse of the state. Many Piauhyenses came on board from the montarias, or ludicrous native rowboats in which they were transferred from the giaolas (literally “bird-cage,” but “river steamer” in Amazonian parlance) that were waiting to carry passengers back up the river, and we had at least a vicarious acquaintance with them.

When I awoke at dawn we were already close to the winking lighthouse known among British mariners as “Maranham,” and soon afterward there appeared a town rather prettily situated on a low ridge. We anchored far out, and it was more than an hour before sailboats brought the authorities to examine us, but that was a small matter to a man with a deck-chair and a passable novel. In fact, there was no hurry about going ashore, for five days would probably suffice to exploit the interest of São Luiz in the Kinetophone, and the rest of the State of Maranhão was virtually inaccessible. More than that, when the local manager came on board through the dingy gray water to pay us his respects he reminded me that this was Wednesday of Holy Week and that it would be foolish to spoil the effect of our estrea by attempting to compete with the priests before Saturday.

In 1612 a Frenchman named La Ravadière founded on an island near the mouth of the Amazon a city which he called Saint Louis in honor of King Louis XIII. Two years later the Portuguese drove out the French and the city became the capital of the province of Maranhão—aboriginal name of the Amazon—which then included all northern Brazil from Ceará to the Andes. The island, which is small, is known as Ilha de São Luiz, and the city is officially São Luiz do Maranhão, though, like most capitals along this coast, it is better known to the outside world by the name of the state. Its harbor is shallow, with much tide, so that when one lands, by launch, rowboat, and finally a negro’s shoulders, the whole raging sea seems beneath one, and six hours later the place is a sand-field, with steamers sitting high and dry and barefoot crab-hunters wandering about on it, as if someone had pulled the cork out of the bottom of the ocean.

A huge old fort and stone wall face the harbor, and from the landing-place a stone-paved street lined by carefully trimmed, haycock-shaped trees slants swiftly up to the venerable cathedral and the main square, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above. Situated on a low, but narrow and broken, ridge, its streets stumble rather steeply up and down in places, and the town is so compact that, once ended, these passageways break off instantly into dense-green and almost trackless jungle, except the single Rua Grande, which goes on across the island. Perhaps it is due to its situation that São Luiz is cooler than its two degrees from the equator would suggest, though here the constant trade winds die down, thereby saving the region from the glaring aridity which characterizes all that part of the continent to the eastward. In fact, somewhere between Ceará and Maranhão is the dividing line between that scantily wooded semi-desert and the humid, dense jungle of the Amazon basin. In many ways São Luiz is the most pleasant little capital along the coast of North Brazil, and not the least of its charms is the pleasure of again seeing grass and trees in all the green profusion of tropical lands. Here one begins to feel that equatorial humidity which leaves even the clothing damp and sticky; by night strange creatures singing in the prolific vegetation mark São Luiz as the beginning of the great Amazonia.

In Brazil it is the custom to interview newspapers rather than to wait to be interviewed, and immediately upon landing the local manager hired an automobile in which all of us engaged in the “necessary courtesy” of calling upon all the editors. Some of them were men of real culture and widely informed, their full Caucasian complexions burned that coppery red of those who have lived for generations near the equator. Even the local cinema manager, who had never been off the little island of São Luiz, spoke faultless French and would not have been out of place in the best society of old Europe. A few, on the other hand, had traveled rather widely, and these were even more inclined than the others to be dogmatic in their editorial wisdom. One vivacious young editor of rather forceful and unusually attractive face for Brazil, who looked like a white man browned up for a minstrel show, who might have been a strong character and a pleasant, handsome fellow had not some wanton ancestor casually added a bit of negro blood to his veins and given him the egotistical volubility, the instability, and the surliness of the mestiço, had no sooner been presented to us than he began talking like a whirlwind about the United States, neither desiring nor expecting to have his opinions in any way questioned, his attitude that of a judge who means to be kindly but who regards his judgments as final. In answer to one question which I managed to thrust between his closely cemented words he casually remarked that, though he knew most of Brazil and had been several times to Europe, he had never visited the United States, adding in his turbulent flow of speech that he had fear rather than a desire to do so “because there life is so intense.” In the next sentence he was assuring, and convincing, his native hearers that the “Collosus of the North” was purely scientific and commercial, without the slightest conception of or interest in anything artistic—and then suddenly he broke forth upon the negro question.

Next to Bahia. Maranhão has the greatest percentage of African blood of all the states of Brazil; hence this was a natural topic. It usually is between educated Brazilians and traveling Americans. The editor’s opinions on the subject were those of many of his class, long since familiar to us. There were 900,000 negroes in Brazil, he dogmatized, in other words about three per cent. of the population(!), who were rapidly being absorbed and would soon disappear, whereas in the United States twelve per cent. of the population were negroes, who, being forced to resist the attitude of the whites, would remain a race apart and a constant and growing menace. In two or three centuries, he prophesied, there would be only negroes left in the United States, because they “reproduce like flies and lie in the shade and live to be a hundred, while the white men are wearing themselves out by their absurdly intense living.” Ergo, Brazil had been far more fortunate and wise in her handling of the negro problem than her great neighbor of the North.

It was the same old argument, the rock on which the bulk of Brazilian and American opinion on this subject always splits. In Brazil the negro is physically stronger and better fitted to the climate than the whites; in the United States, as a whole, the reverse is the case. This, and certain other differences overlooked by most Brazilians, keep the argument from becoming clean-cut. Yet is the negro, or at least the part-negro, the best type that can permanently prosper under Brazilian conditions? No one of tropical experience and an open mind believes that the white race, pure and unadulterated, can maintain its high standing for generations in equatorial regions without frequent reinforcements either by training in, or immigration from, the temperate zones. Can some such standard be maintained by mixing it with those to whom the tropics are a natural habitat? Is it better to “wash out the black” through many generations of lowering the whites, to breed a new type, a kind of human mule, to fit the climate and conditions, or to keep the two races strictly, even forcibly, separated? The first is the Brazilian, the second the American point of view, and the gulf between them is not easily bridged.

That night we gave a special performance for the press, which was attended by about forty representatives of São Luiz’ four daily journals. This and the ceremonial visits were probably worth the trouble, for the papers next day were equally enthusiastic about the Kinetophone and its “highly cultured” sponsors, whose names, titles, and previous condition of servitude they gave in full down to the latest count of Carlos’ children. Indeed, we became the subject of the chief editorials, even in the face of religious competition. The most famous living wielder of a quill in Maranhão took us amiably to task for using the full name of the inventor on our advertising matter, contending—in his paper’s two most prominent columns—that it was an indignity to style “Thomaz A. Edison, like any commonplace mortal, a man whose Godlike gifts to the world had made him to all mankind for all time the one and only EDISON.” Naturally such publicity hurt our feelings.

But the result of all this could not be known for three days, Thursday and Friday being so holy that even churches could not ring their bells—for which we gave fervent thanks, well knowing that the respite would be soundly broken on Easter Sunday. The “only one” in town was the “Hotel Central,” a big colonial two-story building directly across from the cathedral, and the French proprietor set a table and attended to business like a Frenchman, instead of being off down the street gossiping. “Tut” and I had a suite of two rooms shut off from most of the uproar of the rest of the house, our living-room immense, with three balconied double windows larger than doors looking down upon the tree-lined promenade and a part of the sea—when the tide was in. Our huge four-poster bed, as well as the smaller one we took turns in occupying, was carefully mosquito-netted, for only white foreigners are said to be subject to yellow fever. There were hammock-hooks, never lacking in North Brazil, in all the walls. Of the mahogany tables, marble-topped bureaus, full-length pier glass in which to admire ourselves, the big cane settee, the comfortable roomy cane rocking-chairs, and the score of minor convenient articles of furniture I will say no more, lest there be a sudden exodus to São Luiz do Maranhão. To be sure, the shower-bath now and then ran dry, but there were really only two drawbacks to the “Hotel Central,”—its kerosene lamps and its “artistas.” Evidently there was no escaping these self-styled “actresses” who distribute themselves throughout the hotels of North Brazil, though the old Frenchman assured us that he had always refused to take them in until the war-bred crisis made their admission “necessary.”

Being so old a city, São Luiz has a finished aspect quite different from many others of more recent origin. It is completely paved in square cobblestones, with very much arched roadways, and all its narrow sidewalks of flat stones, polished by many generations of feet, are so slanting that one must take care if he would not, as I all but did more than once, spill himself wrong end up in the middle of the street. We had at last outstripped civilization, in its more modern manifestations. All the way up the coast each state capital had put in electric street-cars and similar contrivances within a year or so—that is, long since I had entered South America. Here we had beaten invention to it, and there was genuine pleasure in seeing drowsy old easy-going mule-cars again—though we never bothered to wait for them. São Luiz, too, still lights itself with matches, though that does not mean, as it would almost certainly in the Andes, that reading is considered bad form. In fact, it is called the Athens of Brazil, and quite justly, for all the rest of the country has scarcely produced as excellent a list of literary men. Graça Aranha, Coelho Netto, the three Azevedo brothers, João Lisboa, the historian, Manuel Mendes, who turned Virgil and Homer into widely famed Portuguese verse, Teixeira Mendes, head of Brazilian Positivists, and Gonsalves Dias, the national poet, are but a few of the famous sons of Maranhão. Of them all, the most beloved, not merely in São Luiz but in all Brazil, is Dias, born of a Portuguese shopkeeper of the interior and his negro slave, and done to death by sharks when the frail craft on which he was returning from Europe with an incurable ailment came to grief within sight of the lighthouse on his native shores. Those who are familiar enough with both tongues to be able to form a judgment, and who have no national prejudices to overcome, assert that as a poet the impulsive, licentious Brazilian mulatto was several rungs higher up the ladder than our own Longfellow. There is a Praça Gonsalves Dias in São Luiz, and in the center of it, at the top of a tall column high up among his beloved palm-trees and the singing sabiás he immortalized in his best known poem, is the poet’s statue, non-committal as to complexion in its white stone (or plaster) and giving him the appearance of a wavy-haired Shakespeare. Not far from this statue, overtopping everything else and giving an aëroplane view of all the city, is an old shot-tower, of the kind used in former days for the making of bullets with the aid of gravitation. Dogs are distressingly numerous, and the charcoal over which the Maranhenses cook in little braziers is carried about town and sold in small baskets hanging six or eight high at either end of bamboo poles. It is a busy town every five days, when a steamer comes from Pará or the south; otherwise it drifts along at a contented, mule-tram pace.

On Thursday evening we stepped across to the cathedral and saw the ceremony of the “Washing of the Feet.” The bishop, in full purple and attended by a throng of assistants and acolytes, without music and with very little light as a sign of mourning, marched along a raised bench where twelve beggars had taken seats hours before. Several of them were blind and all of them diseased, and they had been dressed in white cotton gowns which partly concealed their natural rags. The bishop placed a silver basin under a foot of each in turn, spilled three drops of water on it, dabbed them with a napkin, then stooped and kissed the unsterilized extremity almost fervently, though with something in his intelligent, clean-cut face which suggested that he did not particularly enjoy this part of his ecclesiastical duties. Each beggar was given a loaf of French bread, a copper coin worth nearly a cent, and what looked like a folded nightshirt, to all of which he clung with both hands as if expecting the densely packed throng of the faithful, virtually all of whom could point back to African ancestry, to snatch the gifts away from him. That night the same class engaged in the annual “hanging of Judas,” and when morning dawned effigies of the traitor of Gethsemane, in most fanciful and multicolored garments, swung by the neck from a score of improvised gibbets.

One of the best known residents of Maranhão is a hardy American who came down twenty years before to set up in Caixas the first cotton-mill in North Brazil—though cotton had been grown there for more than a century. There he married, became a power in the cattle and mining industries, and established a line of river-steamers to that principal town of the interior. Brazil, as he put it, is an easy country in which to make a living, but a hard one in which to make a fortune. Once real wealth begins to show its face, the native politicians see to it that it does not become too swollen. Cattle are the principal product of the state, but a sack of salt costing two or three milreis in São Luiz to begin with, reached the incredible price of 24$ in the interior. All Brazil, in his opinion, would prove fitted for the white man, once the more temperate south was filled up; but as yet only the two hundredth part of the republic was under cultivation.

We opened on Saturday night after the longest period of idleness since the Kinetophone had made its bow to Brazil. It was perhaps the combination of good advertising, after-Lent reaction, and the fact that São Luiz gets few good entertainments that brought greater crowds than we could accommodate. Our performance, too, pleased more than usual there, thanks among other things to excellent acoustic properties and to a few lines in our introductory number from “O Canto do Sabiá,” best known poem of Gonsalves Dias. The result was that as often as we chose to open it we filled the house so tightly that I could barely squeeze in myself. Unfortunately the remodeled shop held only four hundred, but on the other hand it was the best managed theater we had seen in Brazil, with “deadheads” almost unknown and the smallest child paying admission. On Sunday we gave a matinée and three evening performances, packing the place so full that we had to call upon the police to restrain those who could not legally be admitted. We took up the tickets inside, as in a street-car, and needed no door-keepers during the performance, for no man, with or without a ticket, could have forced his way into that sardine-box. The street outside was blocked with those waiting to get into the next sessão, the sidewalks lined with chairs filled with fancily dressed women of the “best families.” That day’s income was larger than we had had since our first Sunday in Pernambuco, and a cablegram carried the news of our popularity to the newspapers of Pará.

There is only one place to take a walk of any length in São Luiz. The Rua Grande turns into a passable road and goes on across the island, but all other streets soon end in swamp or jungle. I tramped out of town one morning and returned that afternoon, having covered fifteen of the twenty miles of island road and return. It was a joy to walk on real earth again after months of wading in sand, and to be surrounded on either hand by a great green wall, instead of a glaring half-desert. On the other hand, the dull skies of the Amazon region were already getting on my nerves, as they do on those who abandon the almost unbroken blue sky and sunshine of the eastern coast. Yet on the whole Brazil has a remarkably even climate for so enormous a stretch of territory, and it was not much warmer here than in Santa Anna on the Uruguayan border. Life out of doors in the tropics is a serious thing, however, and here was the real, humid, densely jungled tropics of the imagination at last. Bamboos waved their titanic plumes above me; a tree ablaze with scarlet blossoms flashed forth from the dense verdure; the fructa-pão, which furnishes its vegetable bread to the poorer classes all the way from Bahia northward, here produced far more abundantly than man required. Palms ranged from those of fern-like delicacy to the coco-babassú, shaped like a gigantic feather-duster stood on end and producing a bunch six feet long of red nuts as large as our walnuts. These contain a kernel of cocoanut meat rich in oil, which was just beginning to be exported to Europe, and unlimited quantities of which could be had for the picking and cracking. Butterflies celebrating their nuptials enlivened the landscape with the flutter of their iridescent multicolored wings; here and there the sabiá, first cousin to our northern robin, sang his familiar song; once or twice I fancied I heard the mãe da lua (mother of the moon), the nightingale of Brazil.

Anil was the largest of several small towns along the way, with a mule-car running the length of it on what used to be a little railroad. A railway also runs across the island, or at least the rusty rails do, hoping some day to reach the mainland by a bridge and continue to Caixas, whence a line already operates to Therezina, capital of the next state east. Several genuine tropical downpours forced me to seek such shelter as was available, and the day was done before I returned to São Luiz. There are many delightful things in the tropics, but none of them equal the soft dusk of evening. Like most fine things, it is short and fleeting, no two minutes alike, and barely a few moments seemed to pass between the last livid rays of the sun, as it veiled itself behind the light band of clouds along the horizon, and the falling of moonlight in flecks of silver through the limply drooping fronds of the palm-trees, stencilled in silhouette against the iridescent sky of a tropical night. It was almost a full year since my last real walk, but no one in São Luiz felt more contented with life than I that evening. Yet my tramp was the only topic of conversation at the cinema, and a newspaper referred editorially next day to the “incredible energy and endurance of our distinguished North American visitor,” who could cover thirty miles of Amazonian ground on his own feet in a single day!

It might have been better for Carlos, too, if he had combatted the climate of the torrid North with pedestrianism. For some time he had been losing his Paulista energy, and with it his interest in life. On the morning after my walk I met him strolling languidly along the main street, looking more disconsolate and colorless than I had ever seen him before; but those are common symptoms in the tropics and I thought little more about it until he failed to join us at dinner that evening. We found him in bed in his room across the hall, with a raging fever. The best recommended physician of São Luiz having arrived, I hurried away to the theater, where both Carlos’ work and my own awaited me.

That night he was neither able to talk nor, apparently, to recognize me. The native leech had diagnosed his ailment all the way from malaria to bubonic plague, and had finally settled upon intestinal grippe. Whatever it was, Carlos was a sick man, and when morning came without any sign of improvement, I set about arranging to get him into a hospital. There were two in São Luiz,—the “Beneficencia Portugueza” and the “Santa Casa da Misericordia.” For several reasons I chose the second. By this time the invalid could scarcely raise his head, or express himself, except by monosyllabic gurgles and the rolling of his bloodshot eyes; yet it was a labor of hours to coax any of his fellow-countrymen to help untangle the red tape that blocked his immediate entrance to the hospital. A colonel connected with the cinema at length agreed to go with me to the doctor whose duty it was to issue tickets of admission, but he insisted on having an automobile at 10$ an hour with which to cover the four short blocks of stone-paved street. When the doctor and the colonel had run through all the gamut of Latin-American salutations, down to the fourth generation and the family cat, a great many questions were asked me before Carlos was finally accepted as a patient, as if it were an extraordinary favor, though the “Santa Casa” was in theory open to all. Then, a bit of rain coming up, the colonel began talking politics and remained for more than an hour, through three more showers. When we finally entered our waiting automobile it was out of gasoline! I raced back to the hotel, impressed two carriers and a hammock into service, and got our ailing companion at last into the hands of the nuns just at nightfall.

As the time was drawing near when we must move on, I appointed the most responsible man in town unofficial guardian for Carlos and turned over to him, against ample receipts, his back pay, his salary to the end of the month, and his fare back to Rio. This should have sufficed amply to pay his hospital bills and carry him home with something to spare, and I had no authority to give him more. Next morning we discovered that Carlos had taken with him our duplicate set of keys, and “Tut” went up to the hospital to get them. The nun-nurse had them in safe-keeping and would not turn them over without Carlos’ permission. He could not talk, but after staring at “Tut” for a long time he faintly nodded. After still longer effort they succeeded in getting, in faintly whispered monosyllables, the address of his family in São Paulo. As “Tut” was leaving, a doctor bustled cheerily into the ward and casually informed him that Carlos had yellow fever.

The indifferent way in which São Luiz took such things gave one a creepy feeling that life was held cheaply in those parts. When Carlos’ condition was mentioned to patrons of the cinema that evening they said, between yawns, “Ja estã liquidado—Oh, he is finished all right,” and went in to weep at some silly film drama and to giggle at Kinetophone humor. I insisted on remaining optimistic. Had we not heard a hundred times that native Brazilians never die of yellow fever, that its fatalities are confined to white foreigners? In other words, while “Tut” and I were constant prospective candidates for an Amazonian cemetery, a man born in São Paulo, accustomed all his life to Brazilian conditions, should be in no great danger. I was still telling myself these things when word reached us that Carlos was dead.

By this time we were already on our way to Pará, for ten-day steamers and theatrical engagements wait for no man. When three men have lived more closely together than brothers for more than half a year the loss of one of them is an astonishingly heavy subtraction, one which we felt all the way from the longer time it took the two of us to tear down the show and send it on board the Ceará, to all those little daily reminders of the loss of a familiar companion. Of course, when we came to think it over, natives do die of yellow fever; but as those living in the regions where it flourishes have either died of it, or recovered from it, in childhood, the survivors are immune and the effect is as if the disease were fatal only to Caucasian visitors. Besides, Carlos, born of Italian parents on the cool Brazilian plateau more than twenty degrees to the south, was virtually a foreigner up here on the steaming equator. The period of incubation being longer than the time we had spent in São Luiz, it was probably the mosquitoes of Ceará that had been his undoing.

We refitted the phonograph with “Tut’s” automatic starting device, which had fallen into disrepair, so that North Brazil might continue to be amused as long as one of us survived. For our troupe, at least, would perform while anyone remained to turn the crank. There were frail young ladies in it, and very few who were acclimated to tropical travel; yet they appeared night after night without changing a hair, doing exactly as good work as when they left New York, playing fully as well to a scattering audience on a sweltering afternoon as to a packed house on a cool evening, never disturbing us with a display of mood or temperament, never showing the slightest impairment from the climate, the soggy Brazilian food, the thousand little tropical and Latin-American annoyances, and never dying of yellow fever. More than once I woke up dreaming that they were subject to all the ills of living men and women, or sweated through a nightmare of trying to transport them all in a small boat, or house them all in a ten-room hotel already half occupied by persons with whom respectable Americans should not come in contact.

A broad light streak on the ocean ahead announced our approach to the mouth of the Amazon, the “river-sea,” as the Brazilians often call it, discoloring the deep-blue Atlantic as far as the eye could reach. Later the water turned a muddy brown and we began to see the smoke from the Pará power-house across the flat featureless landscape. Monotonous dense greenery soon surrounded us, flat, impenetrable forests spreading from the very edge of the river to infinity on either hand. Everywhere the vast stream was dotted with sailboats, their lateen sails all dyed some single bright color,—blue, saffron, red, faded pink. Then flat wooded islands scattered all about appeared, and finally an opening in the flat landscape disclosed the low City of Pará, still so far away as to be almost indistinguishable, and before we could steam up to it swift tropical darkness had fallen.

We dropped anchor for the night before its long row of lights, the passengers whiling away the evening with music and dancing, no one apparently sorry to save a hotel-bill out in the cool breezes of the quiet river. We were so close to the town that we could hear the night life under the trees in the central praça and see the electric street-cars go frequently slipping past. It may have been the sight of the cathedral, bulking forth out of the night above the rest of the city, that turned the group of Brazilian men gathered on the after saloon deck to a discussion of religion—though it was not a particularly religious discussion. In fact, the crux of every one of a score of anecdotes was the grafting of priests, and the men one and all agreed that the ecclesiastics were even more diligent and clever at it than politicians; but they all took care that the women on board should hear none of their stories.

A steward called us at daybreak, escaping before I could get hold of the revolver in the bottom of my valise. A fog half concealed the city, gradually disclosing, as the equatorial sun burned it away, long rows of docks and warehouses, the “new” town floor-flat, with a water-tower standing above the rest, and a fish-market swarming with sailboats and clamoring people, the old city rising slightly on a knoll topped by the cathedral. It was more than two hours later that the port doctor came on board to examine us. As I replied “All right” to the steward who came to tell me to report, and continued reading in my steamer-chair without hearing from him again, I fancy it must have been a thorough examination. The sunshine was falling in streams of molten lead when we finally hoisted our mud-hook and pulled up to a dock—for the first time since we had landed in Bahia. A large crowd, astonishingly European in origin, was gathered along the quay, giving little or no attention to the heavy showers that every now and then broke forth from a half cloudless sky.

Vinhães was on hand, with a dozen newspapers containing large Kinetophone displays, and together we went down into the hubbub of the hold, through the chaotic network of third-class hammocks, to fight to have our baggage landed in time for an evening performance. A few ports back our phonograph had nearly been put out of business by a careless drayman, and since then I had been taking no chances, though I had to dog the steps of two negroes, ordered to carry it by the handles, to keep them from putting it on their heads. In up-to-date Pará, however, we had only to have it placed in a large and luxurious taxicab and drive away with it to the “Bar Paraense.” This half-open theater out in the Nazareth section of town was somewhat more distant from the center than we should have preferred; but it was the best Vinhães had been able to get. The labor of setting up emphasized the loss of Carlos, especially as this was one of those big ramshackle buildings we now and then came across where it took a score of pulleys to carry our synchronizing cord from the booth to the phonograph. But at least we returned to comfortable quarters when our labors were over. The “Café da Paz” was as well run under its Swiss maître d’hôtel as a high-class European hostelry with several tropical improvements, and as it was owned by the same cultured and upright copper-tinted gentleman who had a half interest in the “Bar Paraense,” the cost of our excellent accommodation was less than we had paid in some unspeakable hovels. To be sure, hard times had given several rapid young ladies admission even here, but they were not on our airy third story, with its huge blind-shaded windows and its view of all Pará. In the halcyon days of rubber, ended barely two years before, the “Café da Paz” was the best hotel in North Brazil, where a small room alone cost more than we were paying now for full accommodation and where one paid 2$ for a place at table and at least as much for each dish ordered.

“Tut” and I had come on the same ticket from Maranhão. In the list of passengers published in that evening’s papers we appeared as “Wayne Tuthill and 1 child.” At dinner we were handed an order from the sanitary department of the State of Pará, commanding “Wayne Tuthill e Harrey” to appear at the yellow fever section for examination. It was evident from the document that only one person was meant by this Latin-American style of double-barreled name; but out of some mixture of curiosity and honesty I took it upon myself next morning to point out the error. For my pains I, too, was commanded to appear at three every afternoon for the next thirteen days, under penalty of fine and imprisonment. I protested that I could not regulate my life in any such bourgeois fashion, and being taken before the head doctor, I informed him that it was my habit and intention to wander about the state during my stay in Pará. So effective was my command of Brazilian super-courtesy by this time that he replied in the same vein, saying all foreigners coming from either Ceará or Manaos, where yellow fever had broken out, were put under observation, but that in my case it would be sufficient if I would report at any time between seven and five on those days when I happened to be in town.

Strictly speaking, there is no city of Pará, nor is it on the Amazon. In 1615 Castello Branco left Maranhão and founded on the spot where the old castle of Pará now stands a village at the junction of the Guajará and Guamá rivers. Both of these are a part of the Amazon system, but they are separated from the mouth of the river proper by the enormous island of Marajó, considerably larger than the Republic of Portugal. The Tupinamba Indians who inhabited the spot were friendly to the newcomers, and as he had left Maranhão on Christmas Day, Branco named the town Nossa Senhora de Belém (Our Lady of Bethlehem); and Belém the capital of the state of Pará is officially and locally to this day. Just two centuries later “Grão Pará” definitely separated from the capitania of Maranhão and became a province, a province of slight importance then, in spite of its enormous size and unlimited tropical forests. In 1852 a Paraense sent the first steamer up the Amazon, but it was not until 1867 that the world’s greatest river was opened to foreign navigation. Ten years later the most famous drought in the history of Ceará sent thousands of Cearenses to open up the great rubber-fields of Grão-Pará and Amazonas, from which the great riches of Belém and Manaos resulted.

Pará is distinctly a maritime city, though it is ninety miles from the ocean. With the exception of a short government line to Bragança on the coast to the west, constructed in 1877, one cannot go anywhere from it except by boat. It is almost less a Brazilian than a European city, with little brotherhood for the rest of the republic. In the newspapers of Pará “America” means New York, which can be reached from there in two or three days less time than are required for a journey to Rio. It was not until we had met some fellow-countrymen who had been treading Broadway ten days before, long after the returning senator of Pará who landed with us had sailed from the national capital, that we realized why the eyes of Pará are fixed on the north and east rather than upon the great country to the south to which it governmentally belongs.

Pará is an exotic growth, a bit of Parisian civilization isolated in an enormous wilderness, which encroaches so constantly upon it that the European air of the center of town quickly disappears in grass-grown alleyways of swamp and jungle. The heavy rains cause this grass to grow with tropical luxuriance and rapidity, so that there are many wide streets laid out between unbroken rows of buildings that are nothing but deep green lawns with a cow-path or two straggling along them. Densest jungle may be found a short stroll from the central praça, and wild Indians, living as they did centuries ago, are only a few hours distant. It is an unfinished city of pompous, got-rich-quick fronts and ragged rears, with only the old town on its knoll, and the few principal streets of the new town paved in stone blocks. The rest is much as nature left it, and while one may find almost anything in this little culture-importing heart of the city which can be had in the centers of civilization, a short walk brings one to isolated houses on stilts and uninhabited clearings through the jungle in which men, driving carts drawn by one bull, wade to their thighs cutting and loading grass. Scarcely a rifle-shot from shops offering the latest Parisian creations one must depend, even for life, on the strength and agility of primitive man.

Pará has been called the “City of Trees.” Corinthian columns of royal palms wave their elegant heads in every direction, mammoth tropical growths of which we of the North do not even know the name shade the squares and praças; the important streets and avenues are lined with shade trees, in nearly every case the mango, with whitened trunks as a protection against tropical plagues and trimmed to a few main branches, instead of being left to its natural appearance of a deep-green haystack. There is a wealth of tropical vegetation in parks and gardens, terminating with the Bosque Rodrigues Alves in the outskirts, a sample of the real Amazonia, dense wild forest where humidity and semi-darkness reign and great trees stand on tiptoe straining their necks in the struggle for air and light above the solid roof of vegetation. Yet the considerable market gardens on the edges of town, tended by Portuguese and other white laborers, show what European immigration can and might do against this prolific militancy of unbridled nature.

In contrast to the surrounding primeval wilderness, there is a suggestion of the vieux port of Marseilles in the Ver-o-peso (See-the-weight), the old rectangular landing-place, so named because in the time of the monarchy fish brought to town were weighed there and assessed a government tax. It is still the chief port for small vessels, and may be found almost any morning packed with sailing ships, their many colored sails giving the scene an effectiveness usually lacking in the monotonously green aspect of equatorial Brazil. These gather from all directions, bringing the products of the adjacent mainland, the Island of Marajó opposite, and of the waters between, and carrying back to the towns and hamlets scattered along either side of this false mouth of the Amazon the products of civilization, ranging from French perfume to manufactured ice. Along the quay of the Ver-o-peso and for some distance back is the public market, filled with many Amazonian products unknown in northern climes. First and foremost is the pirarucú, a fat, reddish-brown fish sometimes called the “cod of the Amazon,” so huge that each scale is nearly two inches across, less often eaten fresh than salted and boxed in great slabs and shipped to every community along the river. Pirarucú is the beef of the Amazonian regions, as farinha is its bread. Turtle flesh is also in great favor, and butter made from the turtle eggs is the most common in the Pará market. Oil of capivara, or river-hog, of tapir, and even of alligator furnish the Paraenses their emulsions. The state taxes every fisherman, and the federal government takes its toll of every turtle, pirarucú, or bottle of oil he brings in. Castanhas, or chestnuts, as what we call the “Brazil nut” is known at home, are to be found in great heaps; these and cacao constitute the principal products of Grão Pará, with one world-famous exception. There are scores of such local commodities as cheiro de mulata, which might be translated as “scent of mulatto-girl,” ground up bark sold in little packages and sprinkled in the frizzled tresses of the purchasers, both as a perfume and to bring good luck. Of native fruits wholly unknown in the temperate zones there are no end,—the mamão, better known by the Spanish-American name of papaya; the graviola, with big green scales and a cream-like interior similar to the chirimoya of Andean valleys; the cupuassú, with an apple taste; the barcury, maracajú, mangaba, muruxy, taxperebá, and many others, less often used as table fruits than as flavoring to sorbets or ice cream, or what a local café-keeper stronger on mixing than on spelling advertises as “cookstails.” The maxixe, by the way, which has reached the North in the form of a Brazilian rag-time dance elaborated from Portuguese and African originals by the negroes of Pernambuco and Bahia, is in its legitimate sense an Amazonian pepper. Above all, there is the assahy, the small fruit of a palm-tree not unlike the date in appearance, from which a non-alcoholic refresco is made, reddish in color and drunk with farinha. This is so great a favorite among Paraenses that they have a saying:

Rubber, the second national industry of Brazil, is of course the life of Pará, which is the reason the city had lost most of its old-time energy. Not only was the rubber market in a chaotic state on account of the World War, but the Amazon was just beginning to feel seriously the competition of the planted rubber-fields of Ceylon, where, in contrast to the high prices of Amazonia, the cost of living is perhaps the lowest in the world. Warehouses that two years before could not hold the rubber that poured in upon them now had a few dozen of the big balls scattered about their huge floors. There they were being cut up—giving them a striking resemblance to dried meat—to make sure the rubber-gatherer had not included a few stones or a low-grade near-rubber called caucho and packed in heavy boxes of native wood for export. All Amazonia, from the laborers who tap the trees to the speculators and explorers and their long train of hangers-on, was feeling the change acutely.

Vinhães never recovered from his astonishment at the difference between this Pará and the one he had known on previous trips. In the good old days of only a few months back Pará was sure it would soon outstrip Paris, so that it had many public and private buildings out of all keeping with its present condition, sumptuous three-story structures marked “Municipal School” on the outside that were mere dusty ruins within, pretentious mansions sitting out wet and lonely, knee-deep in grass, on an imaginary avenue. Then throngs of humanity, all leaving money behind them, poured in and out of the gateway to the Amazon. To-day, with her chief commerce languishing in the throes of death, Pará was provincial again—a stranger attracted attention and everyone knew everyone else. Even now there were few beggars, thanks, perhaps, both to habit and to the scarcity of negro blood, but in the days of prosperity, we were assured, almost any barefoot Portuguese carregador had a conto or two in his pocket. The “Theatro da Paz,” built in the time of the monarchy more than thirty years before, and the most sumptuous in Brazil until the municipal theaters of Rio and São Paulo were constructed, had not been opened in months. On its façade still hung the remnants of advertising of one of the favorite entertainments of the old money-flowing days:

It had indeed played them false.

A negro is almost conspicuous in Pará, and it is a question whether there are not more caboclos, that is, Indian mixtures, than mulattoes. Not merely did the exploiting of the Amazonian region begin late in the life of the monarchy, but the northern part of Brazil freed its slaves before the national decree of emancipation was promulgated. The city itself rivals the southernmost states as a European Brazil. White men, from English merchants to barefoot Portuguese laborers, their olive skins seeming strangely pale in the blazing sunshine, make up almost a majority of the population. It is a dressy, formal community for all that, and notwithstanding the heat of a sea-level city on the equator. Politicians in wintry garb, their high silk hats tilted against the sun ever so slightly, an umbrella grasped in their sweat-dripping hands, may be seen making their way to the palace, on the roof-tree of which vultures are languidly preening themselves. Now and then these overdressed gentlemen cast a wise but circumspect eye upon the mameluco and mulatto women passing with bundles on their heads, moving their hips slightly yet conspicuously, filling the air with their personal odor mingled with that of the cheiro de mulata sprinkled in their hair, their thin low waists showing coppery or brown skins that are more suggestive than nudity. On Sunday afternoons an automobile parade speeds up and down the Estrada de Nazareth, the men stiffly correct in attire down to wintry woolen spats, the women—but these are most apt to be European adventuresses who have seen better and younger days, who spend their evenings on the stage of the “Moulin Rouge,” but who now sit in pompous bourgeois correctness in their open taxis, ever buoyed up by the hope of attracting the husband of some bejeweled resident along this finest of Pará’s avenues, a hope in which they are frequently not disappointed. It is characteristic of the Brazilian point of view that not only do the legitimate ladies of these sumptuous residences lean on their powdered elbows at the windows studying in detail their possible rivals, but that they see nothing amiss in joining the procession, so long as they have a close male relative along to protect them from scandalous tongues.

There is an old bullring in Pará, but it has long been used only as a school. The two churches in Brazil at all worth seeing are the Candalaria of Rio and the Sé, or cathedral, of Belém. The latter is imposing in structure and situation and has several artistic pictures. Catholicism, however, by no means has everything its own way in the metropolis of the Amazon. For one thing, there are said to be eight Masonic lodges, with a membership of nearly eighty per cent. of the male population. Electricity and gasoline have almost entirely taken the place of the screaming ox-carts so familiar there not many years ago. The “Pará Electric Railways and Lighting Company” had already given the city good British service for six years. The cars, unlike those in the rest of Brazil, have a center aisle, probably because the incessant rains would make the crawling under side-curtains an unendurable nuisance. If anything, the division into classes is more marked than in Rio itself. The man with a missing sock or collar pays almost the same fare as his fully dressed fellow and rides in exactly the same kind of car, except that on the outside it is branded with the word “Segunda.” A famous American ornithologist, who knows more of the interior of Brazil and its bird life than all Brazil’s thirty millions, had been standing on a corner signaling in vain to car after car to carry him and a suitcase full of feathered trophies out to the Museo Goeldi when it became my pleasure to explain to him the Brazilian system of “baggage” street-cars.