In the port everything is afloat. Houses, built of poles and thatch tied together with jungle vines, are set on rafts made of great logs of various light woods similar to balsawood. At high water the whole settlement would be afloat in the river but the waters in the upper Amazon basin are low now (mid-August), so half the riverport is stranded on the brown beach.
The houses stretch for half a mile in straggling rows. On the hump of the great sand bar are thatched shops selling groceries and drygoods, bars, small restaurants. The river merchants buy snakeskins, pelts, and alligator hides, bananas, rice. At the entrance to one thatched hut is a crate of orange and brown small monkeys. Their tiny black faces peer out wretchedly through the slats. From another door a big black terrapin is just about to make good his escape when he’s recaptured and turned ignominiously over on his back.
There are pet parrots and parakeets everywhere. Pigs and small children roam in the alleys. A dead iguana rots in a puddle at the river’s edge. Black buzzards perch on the roof-trees.
It is hot. The place smells, but now and then a gust of freshness comes from the river. The people are quiet and friendly and go about their business with an air of great goodnature. Nobody stares at a stranger.
These are not exactly Peruvians or Brazilians. They are river people of the Amazon, made up perhaps two thirds of forest Indian, a third of various brownskinned Mediterranean strains with a touch of Negro. They are darker than the Indians of the forest tribes.
The river is full of coming and going in dugout canoes, or in enlarged dugouts driven by an outboard motor where the passengers sit comfortably under a light thatch of palm leaves. There are motorboats and launches in all sorts of homemade shapes. Women are arriving from little hamlets up and down stream in their brightest clothes to market and to buy and sell. The man paddling is always in the bow. Often the woman in the stern has a pink or red sunshade.
On the bank, and from the rafts the houses float on, women are washing clothes. Brown children are bathing. One stark naked little girl, modestly hidden from view by an enormous straw hat bigger than she is, is dunking herself between her home and the muddy shore.
Further out men fish from canoes, using fishspears or throwing a round casting net. An occasional old man bottom-fishes with a bamboo pole. Fish are plentiful we are told because the water is low. Among the canoes dolphins occasionally surface, the famous pink porpoises of the Amazon. Some are pinkish, some light gray, some black. A boy tells us that the black ones are dangerous. They have been known to attack a canoe.
Iquitos proper — some people told us it had fifty thousand, others eighty thousand inhabitants — has considerable business in spite of the lack of overland links to the rest of the world. Everything that doesn’t come by air has to come by river. The manager of one of the three Bata shoestores told us that he found it more economical to fly in his shoes from the factory in Callao. This was because of the pilfering that went on during the long truck and boat haul via Pucallpa.
Gasoline is cheap and plentiful as the crude oil comes down river from the Peruvian fields in the upper Marañon to a distillery a few miles below Iquitos. There’s a plant for processing chicle brought in from the forest, an alcohol distillery and a sawmill for tropical woods.
The docks and warehouses for oceangoing steamers, mostly monthly ships of the Booth Line out of Liverpool, are new and modern. The channel is reported to have ample depth for ships drawing fourteen feet. The city is the furnishing center for a huge region of the upper Amazon basin reaching to the Ecuadorian and Colombian borders. Protected by chloroquin from malaria and by the vaccine from jungle yellow fever, with the help of outboard motors the mestizo watermen and half civilized Indians are pushing up the rivers of the upper Amazon basin in all directions. They are fast annihilating the wild life.
Shrunken heads are a thing of the past. The few smuggled with great pretense of secrecy to gullible tourists are mostly dried monkey skulls.
Science’s insatiable demand for small primates is depleting the monkey tribes. One dealer, a young man who started a number of years ago with a hundred soles for capital, and is now reputed to be a millionaire, told us how his hunters caught the poor banderlog. They pick a tree frequented by bands of small monkeys and hang ripe bananas in the branches to attract them. Gradually they get the monkeys accustomed to eating their bananas on the ground and then they set out pans of sweetened aguardiente among the bananas. The monkeys take to drinking it. The bands of drunken monkeys, the dealer told us, were irresistibly comic. Imagine a drunken monkey trying to peel a banana. When they are so drunk they can’t climb, the hunters rush in and thrust them by the hundreds into burlap bags.
The large monkeys that roam in family groups have a grimmer fate. Since a shotgun would scare them, the hunters still use the Indian pucuna (serebatana is the Spanish and Portuguese name). The blowgun is a remarkably deadly weapon, shooting a tiny dart poisoned with curare with great force and accuracy at short range. The hunters shoot an old male, who is usually carrying a baby monkey on his back, and bag the rest of them when they crowd around to try to carry off the corpse. So that the monkeys can’t pull the darts out in time the head of the dart is cut so that it breaks off under the skin. Curare kills even a large animal like a jaguar or tapir, we were told, in less than ten seconds.
There are seven firms in Iquitos exporting wild animals and tropical fish direct to the States. Tropical fish are the money makers. A rare specimen will bring a thousand soles. The story goes that there are more varieties of fish in the Amazon region than in all the other fresh waters of the world put together.
The trader equips the fishermen with boat and outboard and nets. When they bring in the fish he keeps them alive in tanks feeding them on tiny leeches which he breeds for the purpose until they can be sorted and counted. An expert waterman will count and sort forty thousand in an hour. Fungus diseases are the worst enemy.
The fish are shipped in plastic bags packed in cartons. Some of the spiny catfish types and the savage piranha have to be dosed with tranquilizers before they are packed so that they won’t tear their plastic bags to pieces en route. A weekly plane from Miami picks up the shipments of fish and forest animals for sale to pet shops and laboratories. Recently shipments have started direct to Hamburg, Germany.
The tropical fish dealer told us that his main difficulty was keeping his fishermen at work. An independent lot. The most skillful only needed to work for him two or three times a year to keep going. When they made a few hundred dollars they would knock off and drink pisco and collect women until their money was all gone. The tribal Indians are monogamous. In most tribes only the curaca (chief) is allowed more than one wife; but the half-breed watermen pride themselves on the number of women they can keep. The trader told of a man with a plantation way up one of the tributary rivers, who kept seventeen. Each has her appointed job, fishing, tending manioc plantings, cooking, weaving mats or hammocks, making pottery. A happy family, the trader called them.
Iquitos has a budding tourist trade. A very blond German named Herman Becker has a camp on the Rio Mamón a few miles out of town and arranges trips out into the rainforest. His brighteyed Portuguese wife is an enthusiast for life al aire libre. Cruising in the fresh breeze up the endlessly winding rivers, seated under an umbrella in an outboard-driven dugout canoe is one of the pleasantest ways of traveling imaginable.