The region we are going through this morning has, for Amazonas, better than average soil and a better than average climate. We find ourselves passing some flourishing plantations of corn, papaya and of the inevitable bushy manioc with its fivefingered redtinted leaves.
We notice a bristlebearded man walking out with a firm step down the center of the road. He wears a battered slouch hat. His clothes, all rags, are stained with the red color of the land. A long shotgun is slung over his shoulder. He makes no move to get out of the way of the car. It’s the car that has to swerve to get around him. “He’s a hunter,” says the stout citybred man who owns the car. “No struggling with unfriendly vegetation for him. He’ll shoot the animals and pick the wild fruits.” There’s a touch of awed admiration in his voice. “For weeks he’ll stay out in the forest alone, hunting game … The forest is his home.”
The surprise of the morning was when, in an open lot fringed with palms, we came upon a group of boys playing baseball. The ballplayers were the first sign we saw of a colony of fifty or sixty Japanese families settled here during the last three years. They have organized a cooperative under the management of a Japanese agronomist to grow black pepper. We began to see carefully weeded rows of staked pepper vines. The palmthatched huts began to take on an indefinable Japanese look. Men wearing conical straw hats were pushing light carts rigged with bicycle wheels. Each house had a vegetable patch and an occasional flowering vine.
The settlers’ houses, built on a framework of poles, lashed together in the local manner by jungle vines, and roofed and walled with palmleaf thatch, were hardly more than shelters against the rain and the sun, but a great neatness prevailed inside. Their tables and benches were hewn out of the local woods.
Everybody had a transistor radio. Their few utensils were cheap imports but shining clean. The kitchens had white enameled gas ranges fired by bottled propane gas trucked out from Manaus. The women were all smiles when we noticed how new they were.
A young man walked us around the cleantilled pepper vines. They grow on heavy stakes like polebeans. The foliage has a darker, glossier look. Once they start to bloom they keep on bearing the racemes of green shotlike peppers for a number of years. When we asked about fertilizers our friend answered with a certain embarrassmet that all they could get was the hulls of the castanha or Brazil nut, sold by the small factories that shell and pack the meats of this most characteristic of Amazonian products. Not much good but it was all that could be had.
When we were about to leave the Japanese picked a couple of the fragrant yellow melonlike fruits of the passionflower vine and insisted on our taking them as a present.
We were shown their school. The school is named for Ryoto Oyama.
Ryoto Oyama was the Japanese who, acting as a sort of opposite number to Henry Wickham, smuggled seed of the jute plant out of Bengal and introduced it in Brazil. Jute is now one of the principal crops of the region. The Japanese are popular in Amazonas.
Back in Manaus, at the exhibit put on by the Association of Commerce, the face of the man in charge lights up when I ask him about jute. The dollar value of jute as a cash crop is fast catching up with all the wild rubber, latex, and guttapercha products combined. Brazil nuts, veneer woods, vegetable oils, tropical fruits, pepper and guaraná roots and berries (the basis of the Brazilian soft drink), fish and chicle; he rattles off the export products.
Petroleum … he frowns when the word comes up.
He tells us that Petrobras, the Brazilian government corporation in charge of the oil industry, has two hundred and fifty prospectors in the field looking for oil. Nothing. He has been told that no results are to be expected till 1966. Meanwhile the local distillery has to depend on Peru and Venezuela and on an occasional shipment from the fardistant Brazilian field at Bahia.
Now jute. He is smiling again. It is suited to the soil. It is easy to cultivate and to process. The growing of jute will give Amazonas a breathing space while the exploitation of other products is being developed.
Like Iquitos, Manaus consists of two towns, the musclebound old city on its hills and a floating town which is the buying and selling center for the dwellers on the rivers and creeks for miles upstream and downstream. Fifty thousand people are said to live on the flutuantes, as they call the floating houses around Manaus. Since the stages of the river have a different schedule here than in the Peruvian region a thousand miles upstream, the water is high now. The rafts are all afloat.
A large bay downstream from the steamship wharves is full of anchored rafts with houses on them. No taxes. No difficulties with the police or shakedown from the politicians. Ample sanitation.
This floating city is more uptodate than the rustic port of Iquitos. There are warehouses with galvanized iron roofs, there are large grocerystores and hardwarestores, filling stations for motorboats and outboards. There is a goodsized clinic advertising the names of a number of doctors. There are repair-shops, warehouses of wholesale merchants who advertize for pelts and crocodile and snake skins, restaurants, cafés and bars, a barbershop.
Watermen, who skull small skiffs or row blue and green painted boats, take the place of taxicabs. They row standing, leaning forward on their oars. Canoes peddling hot coffee from raft to raft have romantic names like Star of the Dawn. A motorized coffee boat is labeled Café Jango, after the nickname of the President of the Republic.
The floating city has a thriving air that is lacking in dryland Manaus. Motor launches and small steamers crowded with passengers come and go. Canoes dart back and forth. Afloat you are free from the frustrating heat that acts like a leaden drag on every movement.
The Junction of the Waters
Invited for a fishing trip on an official cabin cruiser we rejoice in the coolness of the air over the moving water. The boat makes its own breeze. As he picks his way out through the skiffs and canoes towards the center of the river the man at the wheel points out people scooping up water in buckets. The dwellers on the flutuantes get their water from the middle of the river where it is reputed to be cleaner.
The waters of the Rio Negro really are black. The boat skims fast over the smooth lacquer surface. We are trolling with very large spoons on heavy nylon line. We are told that the river fish when they bite come big. This does not turn out to be the day.
There is a great deal to look at as we skirt the shore opposite the city. It is a day of blue sky and a thousand pale lavender-shadowed white blobs of cloud. The greens of the trees which stand kneedeep out of the dark water are incredibly varied. Palms of different shapes sprout out at all sorts of angles. There are misty thickets of bamboo and huge broad-leaved arboreal monsters and spindly saplings with fine pale-green foliage. One of the characteristics of the Amazon forest is the fantastic number of different species to be found in any patch of woodland. You hardly see the same tree twice.