A purely Indian festival is celebrated the first week in February, which is called the Feast of Fruits: several kinds of wild fruit becoming ripe at that time, more particularly the Umari and the Wishi, two sorts which are a favourite food of the people of this province, although of a bitter taste and unpalatable to Europeans. It takes place at the houses of a few families of the Juri tribe, hidden in the depths of the forest on the banks of a creek about three miles from Ega. I saw a little of it one year, when hunting in the neighbourhood with an Indian attendant. ‘There were about 150 people assembled, nearly all red-skins, and signs of the orgy having been very rampant the

previous night were apparent in the litter and confusion all around, and in the number of drunken men lying asleep under the trees and sheds. The women had manufactured a great quantity of spirits in rude clay stills, from mandioca, bananas, and pine-apples. _I doubt whether there was ever much symbolic meaning attached by the aborigines to festivals of this kind. The harvest-time of the Umari and Wishi is one of their seasons of abundance, and they naturally made it the occasion of one of their mad, drunken holidays. They learnt the art of distilling spirits from the early Portuguese; it is only, however, one or two of the superior tribes, such as the Juris and Passés, who practise it. The Indians of the Upper Amazons, like those of the Lower river, mostly use fermented drinks (called here Caysima), made from mandioca cakes and different kinds of fruit.

I did not see much fruit about. A few old women in one of the sheds were preparing and cooking porridge of bananas in large earthenware kettles. It was now near midday, the time when a little rest is taken before resuming the orgy in the evening; but a small party of young men and women were keeping up the dance to the accompaniment of drums made of hollow logs and beaten with the hands. The men formed a curved line on the outside, and the women a similar line on the inside facing their partners. ‘Each man had in his right hand a long reed representing a javelin, and rested his left on the shoulders of his neighbour. ‘They all moved, first to the right and then to the left, with a slow step, singing a drawling monotonous verse, in a language which I did not understand. The same figure was repeated in the dreariest possible way for at least half an hour, and in fact constituted the whole of the dance. The assembled crowd included individuals of most of the tribes living in the region around Ega; but the majority. were Miranhas and Juris. They had no common chief, an active, middle-aged Juri, named Alexandro, in the employ of Senhor Chrysostomo of Ega, seeming to have the principal management. This festival of fruits was the only occasion in which the Indians of the neighbourhood assembled together or exhibited any traces of joint action. It declined in importance every year, and will no doubt soon be discontinued altogether. The trade of Ega, like that of all places on the Upper Amazons, consists in the collecting of the produce of the forests and waters, and exchang-ing it for European and North American goods. About a dozen large vessels, schooners and cubertas, owned by the merchants of the place, are employed in the traffic. Only one voyage a year is made to Para, which occupies from four to five months, and is arranged so that the vessels shall return before the height of the dry season, when they are sent with assortments of goods—cloth, hardware, salt, and a few luxuries, such as biscuits, wine, etc., to the fishing stations, to buy up produce for the next trip to the capital. Although large profits are apparently made both ways, the retail prices of European wares being from 4o to 80 per cent. higher, and the net prices of produce to the same degree lower, than those of Para, the traders do not get rich very rapidly. An old Portuguese, who had traded with success at Ega for thirty years, was reputed rich when he died: his savings then amounting to nine contos

of reis, or about a thousand pounds sterling. The value of produce fluctuates much, and losses are often sustained in consequence. Excessively long credit is given: the system being to trust the collectors of produce with goods a twelvemonth in advance; and if anything happens in the meantime to a customer, the debt is lost altogether.

The articles of export from the upper river are cacao, salsaparilla, Brazil nuts, bast for caulking vessels (the inner bark of various species of Lecythidez or Brazil-nut trees), copaiiba balsam, India-rubber, salt-fish (piraruct), turtle-oil, mishira (potted vacca marina), and grass hammocks. ‘The total value of the produce annually exported from Ega, I calculated at from seven to eight thousand pounds sterling. Most of the articles are collected in the forest by the Ega people, who take their families and live in the woods for months at a time, during the proper seasons. Some of the productions, such as salsaparilla and balsam of copatiba, have been long ago exhausted in the neighbourhood of towns, at least near the banks of the rivers, the only parts that have yet been explored, and are now got only by more adventurous traders during long voyages up the branch streams. ‘The search for Indiarubber has commenced but very lately; the tree appears to grow plentifully on some of the rivers, but only an insignificant fraction of the immense forest has yet been examined Grass hammocks are manufactured by the wild tribes, and purchased of them in considerable quantities by the salsaparilla collectors. They are knitted with simple rods, except the larger kinds, which are woven in clumsy wooden looms. The fibre of which they are made is not grass, but the young leaflets of certain kinds of palm trees (Astryocaryum). These are split, and the strips twisted into two or three-strand cord, by rolling them with the fingers on the naked thigh. Salt-fish and mishira are prepared by the half-breeds and civilised Indians, who establish fishing stations (feitorias) on the great sandbanks laid bare by the retreating waters, in places where fish, turtle, and manatee abound, and spend the whole of the dry season in this occupation. Turtle oil is made from the eggs of the large river turtle, and is one of the principal productions of the district; the mode of collecting the eggs and extracting the oil will be described in the next chapter. I know several men who have been able, with ordinary sobriety and industry, to bring up their families very respectably, and save money at Ega, as collectors of the spontaneous productions of the neighbourhood. Each family, however, besides this trade, has its little plantation of mandioca, coffee, beans, water melons, tobacco, and so forth, which is managed almost solely by the women. Some do not take the trouble to clear a piece of forest for this purpose, but make use of the sloping, bare, earthy banks of the Solimoens, which remain uncovered by water during eight or nine months of the year, and consequently long enough to give time for the ripening of the crops of mandioca, beans, and so forth. The process with regard to mandioca, the bread of the country, is very simple. A party of women take a few bundles of maniva (mandioca shoots) some fine day in July or August, when the river has sunk some few feet, and plant them in the rich alluvial soil, reckoning with the utmost certainty on finding a plentiful

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crop when they return in January or February. The regular plantations are all situated some distance from Ega, and across the water, nothing . being safe on the mainland near the town on account of the cattle, some hundred head of which are kept grazing in the streets by the townsfolk. Every morning, soon after daybreak, the women are seen paddling off in montarias to their daily labours in these vogas or clearings; the mistresses of households with their groups of Indian servant girls. The term agriculture cannot be applied to this business; in this primitive country plough, spade, and hoe are unknown even by name. The people idle away most of the time at their voc¢as, and have no system when they do work, so that a family rarely produces more than is required for its own consumption.

The half-caste and Indian women, after middle age, are nearly al! addicted to the use of Ypadu, the powdered leaves of a plant (Erythroxylon coca) which is well known as a product of the eastern parts of Peru, and is to the natives of these regions what opium is to the Turks and betel to the Malays. Persons who indulge in Ypadu at Ega are held in such abhorrence, that they keep the matter as secret as possible; so it is said, and no doubt with truth, that the slender result of the women’s daily visits to their vocas is owing to their excessive use of this drug. They plant their little plots of the tree in retired nooks in the forest, and keep their stores of the powder in hiding-places near the huts which are built on each plantation. ‘Taken in moderation, Ypadu has a stimulating and not injurious effect, but in excess it is very weakening, destroying the appetite, and producing in time great nervous exhaustion. I once had an opportunity of seeing it made at the house ° of a Maraua Indian on the banks of the Jutahi. The leaves were dried on a mandioca oven, and afterwards pounded in a very long and narrow wooden mortar. When about half pulverised, a number of the large leaves of the Cecropia palmata (candelabrum tree) were burnt on the floor, and the ashes dirtily gathered up and mixed with the powder. The Ypaduti-eaters say that this prevents the ill-effects which would arise from the use of the pure leaf, but I should think the mixture of so much indigestible filth would be more likely to have the opposite result. We lived at Ega, during most part of the year, on turtle. The great fresh-water turtle of the Amazons grows on the upper river to an immense size, a full-grown one measuring nearly three feet in length by two in breadth, and is a load for the strongest Indian. Every house has a little pond, called a curral (pen), in -the back-yard to hold a stock of the animals through the season of dearth—the wet months; those who have a number of Indians in their employ sending them out for a month when the waters are low, to collect a stock, and those who have not, purchasing their supply; with some difficulty, however, as they are rarely offered for sale. The price of turtles, like that of all other articles of food, has risen greatly with the introduction of steam-vessels. When I arrived in 1850, a middle-sized one could be bought pretty readily for ninepence, but when I left in 1859, they were with difficulty obtained at eight and nine shillings each. The abundance of turtles, or rather the facility with which they can be found and caught, varies with

the amount of annual subsidence of the waters. When the river sinks less than the average, they are scarce; but when more, they can be caught in plenty, the bays and shallow lagoons in the forest having then only a small depth of water. The flesh is very tender, palatable, and wholesome; but it is very cloying: every one ends, sooner or later, by becoming thoroughly surfeited. I became so sick of turtle in the course of two years that I could not bear the smell of it, although at the same time nothing else was to be had, and I was suffering actual hunger. The native women cook it in various ways. The entrails are chopped up and made into a delicious soup called sarapatel, which is generally boiled in the concave upper shell of the animal used as a kettle. The tender flesh of the breast is partially minced with farinha, and the breast shell then roasted over the fire, making a very pleasant dish. Steaks cut from the breast and cooked with the fat form another palatable dish. Large sausages are made of the thick-coated stomach, which is filled with minced meat and boiled. The quarters cooked in a kettle of Tucupi sauce form another variety of food. When surfeited with turtle in all other shapes, pieces of the lean part roasted on a spit and moistened only with vinegar make an agreeable change. The smaller kind of turtle, the tracaj4, which makes its appearance in the main river, and lays its eggs a month earlier than the large species, is of less utility to the inhabitants, although its flesh is superior, on account of the difficulty of keeping it alive; it survives captivity but a very few days, although placed in the same ponds in which the large turtle keeps well for two or three years.

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