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Two windows opened on to the deck, and the light beating through them when the ship was roasted on the Amazons had turned the prints on the opposite wall to a faint yellow colour, so that "The Coliseum" was scarcely to be distinguished from Queen Alexandra playing with her Spaniels.
I must confine myself in this place to a few remarks on the order Lepidoptera, and on the ants, several kinds of which, found chiefly on the Upper Amazons, exhibit the most extraordinary instincts. I found about 550 distinct species of butterflies at Ega.
We now approached, in fact, the mouth of the Tapajos, whose clear olive- green waters here replaced the muddy current against which we had so long been sailing. Although this is a river of great extent 1000 miles in length, and, for the last eighty miles of its course, four to ten in breadth its contribution to the Amazons is not perceptible in the middle of the stream.
I was obliged then to descend to Para, but returned, after finishing the examination of the middle part of the Lower Amazons and the Tapajos, in 1855, with my Santarem assistant and better provided for making collections on the upper river.
The pretty little town, or city as it is called, with its rows of tolerably uniform, white-washed and red-tiled houses surrounded by green gardens and woods, stands on gently sloping ground on the eastern side of the Tapajos, close to its point of junction with the Amazons.
It is singular that the graceful curved patterns used by the South Sea Islanders are quite unknown among the Brazilian red men; they being all tattooed either in simple lines or patches. The nearest approach to elegance of design which I saw was amongst the Tucunas of the Upper Amazons, some of whom have a scroll-like mark on each cheek, proceeding from the corner of the mouth.
We made acquaintance on this coast with a new insect pest, the Pium, a minute fly, two thirds of a line in length, which here commences its reign, and continues henceforward as a terrible scourge along the upper river, or Solimoens, to the end of the navigation on the Amazons.
Orellana, after he failed of the discovery of Guiana by the said river of Amazons, passed into Spain, and there obtained a patent of the king for the invasion and conquest, but died by sea about the islands; and his fleet being severed by tempest, the action for that time proceeded not. Diego Ordas followed the enterprise, and departed Spain with 600 soldiers and thirty horse.
"These wonderful trees grow most abundantly in the valleys of the Amazons, and generally throughout tropical America. In size and beauty, they rank as monarchs of their native forests.
They were to me objects of great curiosity as being messengers from the distant volcanoes of the Andes Cotopaxi, Llanganete, or Sangay which rear their peaks amongst the rivulets that feed some of the early tributaries of the Amazons, such as the Macas, the Pastaza, and the Napo. The stones must have already travelled a distance of 1200 miles.
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