for every pound of it was worth from three to four francs. The
jangada also took fifty hundredweight of sarsaparilla, a smilax which
forms an important branch of foreign trade throughout the Amazon
districts, and is getting rarer and rarer along the banks of the
river, so that the natives are very careful to spare the stems when
they gather them. Tonquin bans, known in Brazil under the name of
_”cumarus,”_ and used in the manufacture of certain essential oils;
sassafras, from which is extracted a precious balsam for wounds;
bales of dyeing plants, cases of several gums, and a quantity of
precious woods, completed a well-adapted cargo for lucrative and easy
sale in the provinces of Para.
Some may feel astonished that the number of Indians and negroes
embarked were only sufficient to work the raft, and that a larger
number were not taken in case of an attack by the riverside Indians.
Such would have been useless. The natives of Central America are not
to be feared in the least, and the times are quite changed since it
was necessary to provide against their aggressions. The Indians along
the river belong to peaceable tribes, and the fiercest of them have
retired before the advancing civilization, and drawn further and
further away from the river and its tributaries. Negro deserters,
escaped from the penal colonies of Brazil, England, Holland, or
France, are alone to be feared. But there are only a small number of
these fugitives, they only move in isolated groups across the
savannahs or the woods, and the jangada was, in a measure, secured
from any attack on the parts of the backwoodsmen.
On the other hand, there were a number of settlements on the
river–towns, villages, and missions. The immense stream no longer
traverses a desert, but a basin which is being colonized day by day.
Danger was not taken into consideration. There were no precautions
against attacks.
To conclude our description of the jangada, we have only to speak of
one or two erections of different kinds which gave it a very
picturesque aspect.
In the bow was the cabin of the pilot–we say in the bow, and not at
the stern, where the helmsman is generally found. In navigating under
such circumstances a rudder is of no use. Long oars have no effect on
a raft of such dimensions, even when worked with a hundred sturdy
arms. It was from the sides, by means of long boathooks or props
thrust against the bed of the stream, that the jangada was kept in
the current, and had its direction altered when going astray. By this
means they could range alongside either bank, if they wished for any
reason to come to a halt. Three or four ubas, and two pirogues, with
the necessary rigging, were carried on board, and afforded easy
communications with the banks. The pilot had to look after the
channels of the river, the deviations of the current, the eddies
which it was necessary to avoid, the creeks or bays which afforded
favorable anchorage, and to do this he had to be in the bow.
If the pilot was the material director of this immense machine–for
can we not justly call it so?–another personage was its spiritual
director; this was Padre Passanha, who had charge of the mission at
Iquitos.
A religious family, like that of Joam Garral’s, had availed
themselves enthusiastically of this occasion of taking him with them.
Padre Passanha, then aged seventy, was a man of great worth, full of
evangelical fervor, charitable and good, and in countries where the
representatives of religion are not always examples of the virtues,
he stood out as the accomplished type of those great missionaries who
have done so much for civilization in the interior of the most savage
regions of the world.
For fifty years Padre Passanha had lived at Iquitos, in the mission
of which he was the chief. He was loved by all, and worthily so. The
Garral family held him in great esteem; it was he who had married the
daughter of Farmer Magalhaës to the clerk who had been received at
the fazenda. He had known the children from birth; he had baptized