Jules Verne (7 page)

These boats were either
"ubas,"
canoes made from the trunk of a tree,
hollowed out by fire, and finished with the ax, pointed and light in
front, and heavy and broad in the stern, able to carry from one to
a dozen paddlers, and of three or four tons burden:
"egariteas,"
constructed on a larger scale, of broader design, and leaving on each
side a gangway for the rowers: or
"jangada,"
rafts of no particular
shape, propelled by a triangular sail, and surmounted by a cabin of mud
and straw, which served the Indian and his family for a floating home.

These three kinds of craft formed the lesser flotilla of the Amazon, and
were only suited for a moderate traffic of passengers or merchandise.

Larger vessels, however, existed, either
"vigilingas,"
ranging from
eight up to ten tons, with three masts rigged with red sails, and which
in calm weather were rowed by four long paddles not at all easy to work
against the stream; or
"cobertas,"
of twenty tons burden, a kind
of junk with a poop behind and a cabin down below, with two masts and
square sails of unequal size, and propelled, when the wind fell, by six
long sweeps which Indians worked from a forecastle.

But neither of these vessels satisfied Joam Garral. From the moment that
he had resolved to descend the Amazon he had thought of making the most
of the voyage by carrying a huge convoy of goods into Para. From this
point of view there was no necessity to descend the river in a hurry.
And the determination to which he had come pleased every one, excepting,
perhaps, Manoel, who would for very good reasons have preferred some
rapid steamboat.

But though the means of transport devised by Joam were primitive in the
extreme, he was going to take with him a numerous following and abandon
himself to the stream under exceptional conditions of comfort and
security.

It would be, in truth, as if a part of the fazenda of Iquitos had
been cut away from the bank and carried down the Amazon with all that
composed the family of the fazender—masters and servants, in their
dwellings, their cottages, and their huts.

The settlement of Iquitos included a part of those magnificent forests
which, in the central districts of South America, are practically
inexhaustible.

Joam Garral thoroughly understood the management of these woods, which
were rich in the most precious and diverse species adapted for joinery,
cabinet work, ship building, and carpentry, and from them he annually
drew considerable profits.

The river was there in front of him, and could it not be as safely and
economically used as a railway if one existed? So every year Joam Garral
felled some hundreds of trees from his stock and formed immense rafts of
floating wood, of joists, beams, and slightly squared trunks, which were
taken to Para in charge of capable pilots who were thoroughly acquainted
with the depths of the river and the direction of its currents.

This year Joam Garral decided to do as he had done in preceding years.
Only, when the raft was made up, he was going to leave to Benito all
the detail of the trading part of the business. But there was no time
to lose. The beginning of June was the best season to start, for the
waters, increased by the floods of the upper basin, would gradually and
gradually subside until the month of October.

The first steps had thus to be taken without delay, for the raft was
to be of unusual proportions. It would be necessary to fell a half-mile
square of the forest which was situated at the junction of the Nanay and
the Amazon—that is to say, the whole river side of the fazenda, to form
the enormous mass, for such were the
jangadas,
or river rafts, which
attained the dimensions of a small island.

It was in this
jangada,
safer than any other vessel of the country,
larger than a hundred
egariteas
or
vigilingas
coupled together, that
Joam Garral proposed to embark with his family, his servants, and his
merchandise.

"Excellent idea!" had cried Minha, clapping her hands, when she learned
her father's scheme.

"Yes," said Yaquita, "and in that way we shall reach Belem without
danger or fatigue."

"And during the stoppages we can have some hunting in the forests which
line the banks," added Benito.

"Won't it take rather long?" observed Manoel; "could we not hit upon
some quicker way of descending the Amazon?"

It would take some time, obviously, but the interested observation of
the young doctor received no attention from any one.

Joam Garral then called in an Indian who was the principal manager of
the fazenda.

"In a month," he said to him, "the jangada must be built and ready to
launch."

"We'll set to work this very day, sir."

It was a heavy task. There were about a hundred Indians and blacks,
and during the first fortnight in May they did wonders. Some people
unaccustomed to these great tree massacres would perhaps have groaned to
see giants many hundred years old fall in a few hours beneath the axes
of the woodmen; but there was such a quantity on the banks of the
river, up stream and down stream, even to the most distant points of
the horizon, that the felling of this half-mile of forest would scarcely
leave an appreciable void.

The superintendent of the men, after receiving the instructions of Joam
Garral, had first cleared the ground of the creepers, brushwood, weeds,
and arborescent plants which obstructed it. Before taking to the saw
and the ax they had armed themselves with a felling-sword, that
indispensable tool of every one who desires to penetrate the Amazonian
forests, a large blade slightly curved, wide and flat, and two or three
feet long, and strongly handled, which the natives wield with consummate
address. In a few hours, with the help of the felling-sword, they had
cleared the ground, cut down the underwood, and opened large gaps into
the densest portions of the wood.

In this way the work progressed. The ground was cleared in front of the
woodmen. The old trunks were divested of their clothing of creepers,
cacti, ferns, mosses, and bromelias. They were stripped naked to the
bark, until such time as the bark itself was stripped from off them.

Then the whole of the workers, before whom fled an innumerable crowd
of monkeys who were hardly their superiors in agility, slung themselves
into the upper branches, sawing off the heavier boughs and cutting down
the topmost limbs, which had to be cleared away on the spot. Very soon
there remained only a doomed forest, with long bare stems, bereft of
their crowns, through which the sun luxuriantly rayed on to the humid
soil which perhaps its shots had never before caressed.

There was not a single tree which could not be used for some work of
skill, either in carpentry or cabinet-work. There, shooting up like
columns of ivory ringed with brown, were wax-palms one hundred and
twenty feet high, and four feet thick at their base; white chestnuts,
which yield the three-cornered nuts;
"murichis,"
unexcelled for
building purposes;
"barrigudos,"
measuring a couple of yards at the
swelling, which is found at a few feet above the earth, trees with
shining russet bark dotted with gray tubercles, each pointed stem of
which supports a horizontal parasol; and
"bombax"
of superb stature,
with its straight and smooth white stem. Among these magnificent
specimens of the Amazonian flora there fell many
"quatibos"
whose
rosy canopies towered above the neighboring trees, whose fruits are
like little cups with rows of chestnuts ranged within, and whose wood of
clear violet is specially in demand for ship-building. And besides there
was the ironwood; and more particularly the
"ibiriratea,"
nearly black
in its skin, and so close grained that of it the Indians make
their battle-axes;
"jacarandas,"
more precious than mahogany;
"cæsalpinas,"
only now found in the depths of the old forests which
have escaped the woodman's ax;
"sapucaias,"
one hundred and fifty feet
high, buttressed by natural arches, which, starting from three yards
from their base, rejoin the tree some thirty feet up the stem, twining
themselves round the trunk like the filatures of a twisted column, whose
head expands in a bouquet of vegetable fireworks made up of the yellow,
purple, and snowy white of the parasitic plants.

Three weeks after the work was begun not one was standing of all the
trees which had covered the angle of the Amazon and the Nanay. The
clearance was complete. Joam Garral had not even had to bestir himself
in the demolition of a forest which it would take twenty or thirty
years to replace. Not a stick of young or old wood was left to mark the
boundary of a future clearing, not even an angle to mark the limit of
the denudation. It was indeed a clean sweep; the trees were cut to the
level of the earth, to wait the day when their roots would be got out,
over which the coming spring would still spread its verdant cloak.

This square space, washed on its sides by the waters of the river and
its tributary, was destined to be cleared, plowed, planted, and sown,
and the following year fields of manioc, coffee-shrubs, sugar-canes,
arrowroot, maize, and peanuts would occupy the ground so recently
covered by the trees.

The last week of the month had not arrived when the trunks, classified
according to their varieties and specific gravity, were symmetrically
arranged on the bank of the Amazon, at the spot where the immense
jangada was to be guilt—which, with the different habitations for the
accommodation of the crew, would become a veritable floating village—to
wait the time when the waters of the river, swollen by the floods, would
raise it and carry it for hundreds of leagues to the Atlantic coast.

The whole time the work was going on Joam Garral had been engaged in
superintending it. From the clearing to the bank of the fazenda he had
formed a large mound on which the portions of the raft were disposed,
and to this matter he had attended entirely himself.

Yaquita was occupied with Cybele with the preparations for the
departure, though the old negress could not be made to understand why
they wanted to go or what they hoped to see.

"But you will see things that you never saw before," Yaquita kept saying
to her.

"Will they be better than what I see now?" was Cybele's invariable
reply.

Minha and her favorite for their part took care of what more
particularly concerned them. They were not preparing for a simple
voyage; for them it was a permanent departure, and there were a thousand
details to look after for settling in the other country in which the
young mulatto was to live with the mistress to whom she was so devotedly
attached. Minha was a trifle sorrowful, but the joyous Lina was quite
unaffected at leaving Iquitos. Minha Valdez would be the same to her as
Minha Garral, and to check her spirits she would have to be separated
from her mistress, and that was never thought of.

Benito had actively assisted his father in the work, which was on the
point of completion. He commenced his apprenticeship to the trade of a
fazender, which would probably one day become his own, as he was about
to do that of a merchant on their descent of the river.

As for Manoel, he divided his time between the house, where Yaquita and
her daughter were as busy as possible, and the clearing, to which Benito
fetched him rather oftener than he thought convenient, and on the whole
the division was very unequal, as may well be imagined.

IT WAS a Sunday, the 26th of May, and the young people had made up
their minds to take a holiday. The weather was splendid, the heat being
tempered by the refreshing breezes which blew from off the Cordilleras,
and everything invited them out for an excursion into the country.

Benito and Manoel had offered to accompany Minha through the thick woods
which bordered the right bank of the Amazon opposite the fazenda.

It was, in a manner, a farewell visit to the charming environs of
Iquitos. The young men went equipped for the chase, but as sportsmen who
had no intention of going far from their companions in pursuit of any
game. Manoel could be trusted for that, and the girls—for Lina could
not leave her mistress—went prepared for a walk, an excursion of two or
three leagues being not too long to frighten them.

Neither Joam Garral nor Yaquita had time to go with them. For one reason
the plan of the jangada was not yet complete, and it was necessary that
its construction should not be interrupted for a day, and another was
that Yaquita and Cybele, well seconded as they were by the domestics of
the fazenda, had not an hour to lose.

Minha had accepted the offer with much pleasure, and so, after breakfast
on the day we speak of, at about eleven o'clock, the two young men and
the two girls met on the bank at the angle where the two streams joined.
One of the blacks went with them. They all embarked in one of the ubas
used in the service of the farm, and after having passed between the
islands of Iquitos and Parianta, they reached the right bank of the
Amazon.

They landed at a clump of superb tree-ferns, which were crowned, at
a height of some thirty feet with a sort of halo made of the dainty
branches of green velvet and the delicate lacework of the drooping
fronds.

"Well, Manoel," said Minha, "it is for me to do the honors of the
forest; you are only a stranger in these regions of the Upper Amazon.
We are at home here, and you must allow me to do my duty, as mistress of
the house."

"Dearest Minha," replied the young man, "you will be none the less
mistress of your house in our town of Belem than at the fazenda of
Iquitos, and there as here—"