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My return journey to Para afforded many incidents characteristic of Amazonian travelling. I left Cameta on the 16th of July. My luggage was embarked in the morning in the Santa Rosa, a vessel of the kind called cuberta, or covered canoe. The cuberta is very much used on these rivers.
About midnight, the tide being favourable and the breeze strong, we crossed the river, taking it in a slanting direction a distance of sixteen miles, and arrived at eight o'clock the following morning at Cameta. This is a town of some importance, pleasantly situated on the somewhat high terra firma of the left bank of the Tocantins.
I thoroughly enjoyed the journey to Cameta; the weather was again beautiful in the extreme. We started from Para at sunrise on the 8th of June, and on the 10th emerged from the narrow channels of the Anapu into the broad Tocantins. The vessel was so full of cargo that there was no room to sleep in the cabin; so we passed the nights on deck.
We had a long chat, took coffee, and upon departing, one of the daughters sent a basket full of oranges for our use down to the canoe. The cost of a cacao plantation in the Obydos district is after the rate of 240 reis or sixpence per tree, which is much higher than at Cameta, where I believe the yield is not so great. The forest here is cleared before planting, and the trees are grown in rows.
At Cameta, the lively, good-humoured, and plain-living Mamelucos formed the bulk of the population, the white immigrants there, as on the RioNegro and Upper Amazons, seeming to have fraternised well with the aborigines. In the neighbourhood of Santarem the Indians, I believe, were originally hostile to the Portuguese; at any rate, the blending of the two races has not been here on a large scale.
Brazilians of all classes still use it extensively in the form of syringes, for injections form a great feature in the popular system of cures; the rubber for this purpose is made into a pear- shaped bottle, and a quill fixed in the long neck. September 24th. Opposite Cameta, the islands are all planted with cacao, the tree which yields the chocolate nut.
On the following day we entered the Anapu, and on the 30th September, after threading again the labyrinth of channels communicating between the Tocantins and the Moju, arrived at Para. I will now give a short account of Cameta, the principal town on the banks of the Tocantins, which I visited for the second time, in June,1849. Mr.
I will defer giving an account of the place till the end of this narrative of our Tocantins voyage. We lost here another of our men, who got drinking with some old companions ashore, and were obliged to start on the difficult journey up the river with two hands only, and they in a very dissatisfied humour with the prospect. The river view from Cameta is magnificent.
He had a little wooden image of Nossa Senora in his rough wooden clothes-chest, and to this he always had recourse when any squall arose, or when we ran aground on a shoal. Another of our sailors was a tawny white of Cameta; the rest were Indians, except the cook, who was a Cafuzo, or half- breed between the Indian and negro.
Women, old and young, some of the latter very good-looking, and a large number of children, besides pet animals, enlivened the encampment. They were all half-breeds, simple, well-disposed people, and explained to us that they were inhabitants of Cameta, who had come thus far, eighty miles, to spend the summer months.
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