by pulling our way from tree to tree. When we encountered a vemanso near the shore, we got along very pleasantly for a few miles by rowing: but this was a rare occurrence. During leisure hours the Indians employed themselves in sewing. Vicente was a good hand at cutting out shirts and trousers, and acted as master tailor to the whole party; each had a thick steel thimble and a stock of needles and thread of his own. Vicente made for me a set of blue-check cotton shirts during the passage. The goodness of these Indians, like that of most others amongst whom I lived, consisted perhaps more in the absence of active bad qualities, than in the possession of good ones; in other words, it was negative rather than positive. Their phlegmatic, apathetic temperament, coldness of desire and deadness of feeling, want of curiosity and slowness of intellect, make the Amazonian Indians very uninteresting companions anywhere. Their imagination is of a dull, gloomy quality, and they seem never to be stirred by the emotions-love, pity, admiration, fear, wonder, joy, enthusiasm. These are characteristics of the whole race. The good fellowship of our Cucamas seemed to rise, not from warm sympathy, but simply from the absence of eager selfishness in small matters. On the morning when the favourable wind sprang up, one of the crew, a lad of about seventeen years of age, was absent ashore at the time of starting, having gone alone in one of the montarias to gather wild fruit. The sails were spread and we travelled for several hours at great speed, leaving the poor fellow to paddle after us against the strong current. Vicente, who might have waited a few minutes at starting, and the others, only laughed when the hardship of their companion was alluded to. He overtook us at night, having worked his way with frightful labour the whole day without a morsel of food. He grinned when he came on board, and not a dozen words were said on either side.

Their want of curiosity is extreme. One day we had an unusually sharp thunder-shower. The crew were lying about the deck, and after each explosion all set up a loud laugh; the wag of the party exclaiming, “There’s my old uncle hunting again!” an expression showing the utter emptiness of mind of the spokesman. I asked Vicente what he thought was the cause of lightning and thunder. He said, ‘‘ Timaa ichoqua,”—I don’t know. He had never given the subject a moment’s thought! It was the same with other things. I asked him who made the sun, the stars, the trees? He didn’t know, and had never heard the subject mentioned amongst his tribe. The Tupi language, at least as taught by the old Jesuits, has a word—Tupana—signifying God. Vicente sometimes used this word, but he showed by his expressions that he did not attach the idea of a Creator to it. He seemed to think it meant some deity, or visible image, which the whites worshipped in the churches he had seen in the villages. None of the Indian tribes on the Upper Amazons have an idea of a Supreme Being, and consequently have no word to express it in their own languages. Vicente thought the river on which we were travelling encircled the whole earth, and that the land was an island, like those seen in the stream, but larger. Here a gleam of curiosity and imagination in the Indian mind is re-

vealed: the necessity of a theory of the earth and water has been felt, and a theory has been suggested. In all other matters not concerning the common wants of life the mind of Vicente was a blank, and such I always found to be the case with the Indian in his natural state. Would a community of any race of men be otherwise, were they isolated for centuries in a wilderness like the Amazonian Indians, associated in small numbers, wholly occupied in procuring a mere subsistence, and without a written language or a leisured class to hand down acquired knowledge from generation to generation?

One day a smart squall gave usa good lift onward; it came with a cold, fine, driving rain, which enveloped the desolate landscape as with a mist: the forest swayed and roared with the force of the gale, and flocks of birds were driven about in alarm over the tree tops. On another occasion a similar squall came from an unfavourable quarter: it fell upon us quite unawares, when we had all our sails out to dry, and blew us broadside foremost on the shore. The vessel was fairly lifted on to the tall bushes which lined the banks, but we sustained no injury beyond the entanglement of our rigging in the branches. The days and nights usually passed in a dead calm, or with light intermittent winds from up river, and consequently full against us. We landed twice a day, to give ourselves and the Indians a little rest and change, and to cook our two meals—breakfast and dinner. There was another passenger beside myself—a cautious, middle-aged Portuguese, who was going to settle at Ega, where he had a brother long since established. He was accommodated in the fore-cabin, or arched covering over the hold. I shared the cabin-proper with Senhores Estulano and Manoel, the latter a young half-caste, son-in-law to the owner of the vessel, under whose tuition I made good progress in learning the Tupi language during the voyage. Our men took it in turns, two at a time, to go out fishing, for which purpose we carried a spare montaria. The master had brought from Barra, as provisions, nothing but stale salt piraruci—half-rotten fish, in large, thin, rusty slabs—farinha, coffee, and treacle. In these voyages passengers are expected to provide for themselves, as no charge is made except for freight of the heavy luggage or cargo they take with them. The Portuguese and myself had brought a few luxuries, such as beans, sugar, biscuits, tea and so forth; but we found ourselves almost obliged to share them with our two companions and the pilot, so that before the voyage was one-third finished the small stock of most of these articles was exhausted. In return we shared in whatever the men brought. Sometimes they were quite unsuccessful, for fish is extremely difficult to procure in the season of high water, on account of the lower lands, lying between the inlets and infinite chain of pools and lakes, being flooded from the main river, thus increasing tenfold the area over which the finny population has to range. On most days, however, they brought two or three fine fish, and once they harpooned a manatee, or Vacca marina. On this last-mentioned occasion we made quite a holiday; the canoe was stopped for six or seven hours, and all turned out into the forest to help to skin and cook the animal. The meat was cut into cubical slabs, and each person skewered a dozen or so of these on a

long stick. Fires were made, and the spits stuck in the ground and slanted over the flames to roast. A drizzling rain fell all the time, and the ground around the fires swarmed with stinging ants, attracted by the entrails and slime which were scattered about. The meat has somewhat the taste of very coarse pork; but the fat, which lies in thick layers between the lean parts, is of a greenish colour, and of a disagreeable fishy flavour. The animal was a large one, measuring nearly ten feet in length, and nine in girth at the broadest part. The manatee is one of the few objects which excite the dull wonder and curiosity of the Indians, notwithstanding its commonness. The fact of its suckling its young at the breast, although an aquatic animal resembling a fish, seems to strike them as something very strange. The animal, as it lay on its back, with its broad rounded head and muzzle, tapering body, and smooth, thick, lead-coloured skin, reminded me of those Egyptian tombs which are made of dark, smooth stone, and shaped to the human figure. It rarely happened that we caught anything near the canoe; but one day, as we were slowly progressing along a vemanso, past a thick bed of floating grasses, the men caught sight of a large Pirarucu: the fish which, salted, forms the staple food of all classes in most parts of the Lower Amazons country. It darted past with great speed close to the surface of the water, exhibiting its ornamental coat of mail, the extremely large, broad scales being margined with bright red. One of the Indians seized a harpoon and, jumping into the montaria, was after it in a moment. He killed it at the distance of a few yards, as it was plunging amongst the entangled beds of grass. The fish was a nearly full-grown one, measuring eight feet in length and five in girth, and supplied us all with two plentiful meals. The best parts only were cooked, the rest being thrown most improvidently to the vultures. The Indian name Pirarucu, or Anatto fish (from Pira, fish; and uruct anatto or red), is in allusion to the red colour of the borders of its scales, and is a sample of the figurative style of nomenclature of the Tupi nation. Notwithstanding the hard fare, the confinement of the canoe, the trying weather,—frequent and drenching rains, with gleams of fiery sunshine,—and the woful desolation of the river scenery, I enjoyed the voyage on the whole. We were not much troubled by mosquitoes, and therefore passed the nights very pleasantly, sleeping on deck, wrapped in blankets or old sails. -When the rains drove us below, we were less comfortable, as there was only just room in the small cabin for three of us to lie close together, and the confined air was stifling. I became inured to the Piums in the course of the first week; all the exposed parts of my body, by that time, being so closely covered with black punctures that the little bloodsuckers could not very easily find an unoccupied place to operate upon. Poor Miguel, the Portuguese, suffered horribly from these pests, his ankles and wrists being so much inflamed that he was confined to his hammock, slung in the hold, for weeks. At every landing-place I had a ramble in the forest, whilst the red skins made the fire and cooked the meal. The result was a large daily addition to my collection of insects, reptiles, and shells. Sometimes

the neighbourhood of our gipsy-like encampment was a tract of dry and spacious forest, pleasant to ramble in; but more frequently it was a rank wilderness, into which it was impossible to penetrate many yards, on account of uprooted trees, entangled webs of monstrous woody climbers, thickets of spiny bamboos, swamps, or obstacles of one kind or other. The drier lands were sometimes beautified to the highest degree by groves of the Urucuri palm (Attalea excelsa), which grew by thousands under the crowns of the lofty ordinary forest trees; their smooth columnar stems being all of nearly equal height (forty or fifty feet), and their broad, finely-pinnated leaves interlocking above to form arches and woven canopies of elegant and diversified shapes. The fruit of this palm ripens on the upper river in April, and during our voyage I saw immense quantities of it strewn about under the trees in places where we encamped. It is similar in size and shape to the date, and has a pleasantly-flavoured juicy pulp. ‘The Indians would not eat it; I was surprised at this, as they greedily devoured many other kinds of palm fruit, whose sour and fibrous pulp was much less palatable. Vicente shook his head when he saw me one day eating a quantity of the Urucuri plums. Iam not sure they were not the cause of a severe indigestion under which I suffered for many days afterwards.

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