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Updated: May 16, 2025
Our first walks were in the immediate suburbs of Para. The city lies on a corner of land formed by the junction of the river Guama with the Para. As I have said before, the forest, which covers the whole country, extends close up to the city streets; indeed, the town is built on a tract of cleared land, and is kept free from the jungle only by the constant care of the Government.
On the strand of Cumana, in the garden of the Guayqueria pilot, we saw for the first time a guama* loaded with flowers, and remarkable for the extreme length and silvery splendour of its numerous stamina. The white stamina, which, to the number of sixty or seventy, are attached to a greenish corolla, have a silky lustre, and are terminated by a yellow anther.
Into it three large rivers discharge their waters, namely, the Guama, the Acara, and the Moju so that it forms a kind of sub-estuary within the grand estuary of Para. It is nearly four miles broad.
That part of the Para river which lies in front of the city, as I have already explained, forms a narrow channel, being separated from the main waters of the estuary by a cluster of islands. This channel is about two miles broad, and constitutes part of the minor estuary of Goajara, into which the three rivers Guama, Moju, and Acara discharge their waters.
Wallace, in the same month, departed from Para to explore the rivers Guama and Capim. I embarked as passenger in a Cameta trading vessel, the St. John, a small schooner of thirty tons burthen. I had learnt by this time that the only way to attain the objects for which I had come to this country was to accustom myself to the ways of life of the humbler classes of the inhabitants.
The flower of the guama is eighteen lines long. This part of the town had just been rebuilt, for the earthquake had laid Cumana in ruins eighteen months before our arrival. By a wooden bridge, we crossed the river Manzanares, which contains a few bavas, or crocodiles of the smaller species.
The surface, though everywhere low, is slightly undulating, so that areas of dry land alternate throughout with areas of swampy ground, the vegetation and animal tenants of the two being widely different. Our residence lay on the side of the city nearest the Guama, on the borders of one of the low and swampy areas which here extends over a portion of the suburbs.
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