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It consists of three long streets, with a few short ones crossing them at right angles, and contains about 2500 inhabitants. It lies just within the mouth of Tapajos, and is divided into two parts, the town and the aldeia or village. The houses of the white and trading classes are substantially built, many being of two and three stories, and all white-washed and tiled.
I arrived at Santarem on my second journey into the interior, in November, 1851, and made it my headquarters for a period, as it turned out, of three years and a half. During this time I made, in pursuance of the plan I had framed, many excursions up the Tapajos, and to other places of interest in the surrounding region.
There was also a large number of cotton and coffee trees. Among the utensils I noticed baskets of different shapes, made of flattened maranta stalks, and dyed various colours. The making of these is an original art of the Passes, but I believe it is also practised by other tribes, for I saw several in the houses of semi- civilised Indians on the Tapajos.
Cherrie and Miller spent the day at the really capital zoological gardens, with the curator, Miss Snethlage. Miss Snethlage, a German lady, is a first rate field and closet naturalist, and an explorer of note, who has gone on foot from the Xingu to the Tapajos.
A couple of days' march northwestward from this station, he in 1909 came across a part of the stream of a river running northward between the Gy-Parana and the Juruena; he could only guess where it debouched, believing it to be into the Madeira, although it was possible that it entered the Gy-Parana or Tapajos.
A stretch of wild, rocky, uninhabited coast was before us, and we were fairly within the Tapajos. Our course lay due west for about twenty miles. The wind increased as we neared Point Cururu, where the river bends from its northern course. A vast expanse of water here stretches to the west and south, and the waves, with a strong breeze, run very high.
The negro seemed a frank, straightforward fellow; he was a native of Pernambuco, but had settled many years ago in this part of the country. He had with him a little Indian girl belonging to the Mauhes tribe, whose native seat is the district of country lying in the rear of the Canoma, between the Madeira and the Tapajos.
The strangely-shaped hills; the forest at their feet, richly varied with palms; the bay of Mapiri on the right, with the dark waters of the Tapajos and its white glistening shores, are all spread out before one, as if depicted on canvas.
It is a campo region; a slightly elevated and undulating tract of land, wooded only in patches, or with single scattered trees. A good deal of the country on the borders of the Tapajos, which flows from the great campo area of interior Brazil, is of this description.
One of the largest semi-civilised tribes inhabiting the banks of the Tapajos are the Mundurucus. They are noted for tattooing their bodies more completely than any other tribe. The whole body is covered with straight lines in diagonal patterns from the mouth downwards, the upper part being left free.
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