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Updated: June 17, 2025
The house was a square building, consisting of four equal-sized rooms; the tiled roof projected all round, so as to form a broad verandah, cool and pleasant to sit and work in. The cultivated ground, which appeared as if newly cleared from the forest, was planted with fruit trees and small plots of coffee and mandioca.
I missed the usual mandioca sheds behind the house, with their surrounding cotton, cacao, coffee, and lemon trees. Two or three young men of the tribe were lounging about the low open doorway. They were stoutly-built fellows, but less well- proportioned than the semi-civilised Indians of the Lower Amazons generally are.
There were also a number of cotton and coffee trees on one side, extending down to the water, which showed that our friends were not ignorant of agriculture. We also saw melons growing in abundance, as well as mandioca and Indian corn. The lady conducted us into her house with as much dignity as a duchess would have done into her palace.
The road was bordered every inch of the way by a thick bed of elegant Lycopodiums. An artificial arrangement of trees and bushes could scarcely have been made to wear so finished an appearance as this naturally decorated avenue. The path at length terminated at a plantation of mandioca, the largest I had yet seen since I left the neighbourhood of Para.
A few rude huts are scattered through the valley, but they are tenanted only for a few days in the year, when their owners come to gather and roast the mandioca of their small clearings. We used generally to take with us two boys one negro, the other Indian to carry our provisions for the day; a few pounds of beef or dried fish, farinha and bananas, with plates, and a kettle for cooking.
When they are ripe, and the snuff-making season sets in, they have a fuddling-bout, lasting many days, which the Brazilians call a Quarentena, and which forms a kind of festival of a semi-religious character. They begin by drinking large quantities of caysuma and cashiri, fermented drinks made of various fruits and mandioca, but they prefer cashaca, or rum, when they can get it.
There was a large plantation of tobacco, besides the usual patches of Indian-corn, sugar-cane, and mandioca; and a grove of cotton, cacao, coffee, and fruit- trees surrounded the house. We passed two nights at anchor in shoaly water off the beach. The weather was most beautiful, and scores of Dolphins rolled and snorted about the canoe all night.
At the end of the vista the bright sunlight shone on an open space, where appeared a small lake, on the opposite side of which we could distinguish several buildings raised on piles a large one in the centre with a deep verandah, the palm-thatched roof of which extended beyond the walls; the whole surrounded by plantations of mandioca, cacao, peach-palms, and other trees.
It was, he told me, called the oven-bird, because it walks over those enormous leaves shaped like the pans used for baking the mandioca. I at once recognised it as the jacana. It had black plumage, with a greenish gloss; its legs were very long and slight, as were its toes and claws, especially the hind toe.
Mr Bates relates, that he saw smoke issuing from a vast number of outlets, one of which was seventy yards distant from the place where the bellows were used. They wander to a great distance in search of plunder, and enter houses for the purpose of carrying off the farina or mandioca meal.
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