XVII
TRAVEL IN BRAZIL (The Amazon trip)
In order to attend the university in Brazil the student must follow the "Classico" track in the
gynasio (High School). He must then pass a rigorous examination. If he successfully passes
the entrance examination he is not only admitted to the university, he receives a stipend while he
attends. Having once acquired "student" status, he is free to proceed at his own rate and the
government gives him his regular stipend. Under these conditions it is difficult to see how
students could call a strike but that is just what the students of the University of Sao Paulo did in
December 1964.
The reitor (head man) of the University at Sao Paulo issued an edict that the students should pay
the equivalent of about 30 cents for their meals in the dining facility of the University. The
students, who had been paying about twenty-five cents for their meals, objected and brought a
stove into the dining area and began to prepare their own food. The reitor ordered the stove
removed and the students went on a strike by refusing to attend lectures. News of the strike in
Sao Paulo spread to the Engineering School at Sao Carlos and our students also went on a strike.
It would seem to be a simple matter to cancel the stipends but the law did not permit that so the
students received their stipends for attending the university although they were refusing to attend
classes.
It was predicted that the strike would go on through the Christmas vacation period which lasts a
month in Brazil so we decided to take advantage of the break to see a bit more of the country.
Mr. Heath saw a notice, in the Sao Paulo newspaper, of an excursion sponsored by the Brazilian
Automobile Club. The excursion was a trip by ship up the Amazon River to Manaus. The
deadline for making application had passed but we decided to try our luck, since we were going
to go to Sao Paulo for the week end. In Sao Paulo we went to the office of the Automobile Club
and found that a reservation had just been turned back and that we could have it. The cost of the
trip for the two of us was approximately $1000 US. I dashed to the branch of an American bank
and quickly cashed a check for $1000 which I then converted into Brazilian currency, receiving
in exchange about 2.6 million cruzeiros which completely filled a large brief case. With this
bag full of currency I purchased passage on the Brazilian ship, Princessa Isabella, for a 21 day
cruise to Manaus, a thousand miles up the Amazon River. We were not only fortunate to get
space but we had the best space on the ship. It was a cabin on the starboard side of the upper
deck with picture windows from which we could later view the wonders of the Amazon River
while enjoying the comfort of our stateroom.
We sailed from Rio de Janiero at 10 a.m. on January 10, 1965 aboard Princessa Isabella which
had been built in Spain and was used, during the travel season, on the run between Brazil and
Europe. She was 550 feet long and carried about 250 passengers. During the off-season she
was used for excursions such as this one up the Amazon River. For the next 21 days our cabin
was our home. We ate and slept on the ship, not only when under way, but also when we were
in port. The format of the cruise was to travel mostly at night and to spend days visiting the
cities of Brazil, which are mostly along the Atlantic coast.
The first port of call was the city of Salvador in the state of Bahia. Salvador is a very old city
and many of the early colonial buildings are still there. The oldest church in Brazil is in
Salvador. It was built in 1549 and Catherine of Portugal is buried in it. Salvador boasts that a
devout Catholic can attend Mass every day for a year without going to the same church twice.
The first day of each port call was always devoted to a guided tour of the area including lunch
ashore. Entertainment, characteristic of the area was usually included. In Salvador the
entertainment included a demonstration of simulated wrestling in which neither of the two
participants ever touched the other although "take downs" and "body slams" were portrayed with
great realism. It was impossible not to admire the skill and agility of the performers. An
outdoor buffet was served to our party but Thelma and I were unable to fight our way though the
crowd to get near the table. Brazilians are a very courteous people except where food is
involved.
The second day in port was always a free day when the passengers could do as they pleased.
Our strategy was to watch during the first day and decide what things we wished to visit or to
revisit the next. Many of the passengers returned to the stores or markets to purchase things that
they carried back to the ship for some undetermined use later. On the free days we usually
visited some museum or zoo or old church or other attraction. We rode the bus and walked
through the streets with no fear except that of the ever present pick-pocket against whom, in
Latin America, it is always necessary to take certain precautions. Although I had no trouble
reading directions, I was handicapped by my lack of verbal ability in the language because I was
at the stage where I could ask questions but unable to understand the answers. But we had no
problems, enjoyed the experience and took many photographs. There were only four English
speaking persons on the ship; Thelma and I and an American woman and her teen age son.
After two days we sailed from Salvador, arriving at the city of Recife on January 14. Recife is
on the point of Brazil closest to Africa. The word recife means reef and doubtless was given to
the city because of the coral (?) reefs that are off shore there. The entrance to Recife harbor is
guarded by a smaller city named Olinda. The place is alleged to have received its name from
the exclamation of a Portuguese sailor who, upon seeing it for the first time, exclaimed "O'
Linda!" (How Beautiful). Whether or not the story is true, the story is credible because the city
and surrounding region is very beautiful. Recife is a sort of Venice as the city is laced with
canals which are crossed by numerous bridges. Thelma and I were walking on a hot Sunday
morning in Recife when we encountered a woman lying in the street, apparently unconscious.
She was well dressed and it was not possible to tell whether she had fainted, was drunk or had
possibly met with an accident. People walked by without paying the least attention to her,
leaving her lying there on the hot pavement. Our natural inclination was to do something; call
for help or move her to the shade. But since the local citizens did nothing, we decided that it
was better not to get involved. This incident illustrates one of the characteristics of the Brazilian
culture. Brazilians have a high degree of loyalty to members of the family and friends but little
or no sense of social responsibility. A Brazilian will keep his own property in good shape but
he would never deign to remove a broken tile in the sidewalk in front of his house, even though
some one might stumble over it and be injured. My conclusion is that this is the result of the
absence of emphasis on ethical behavior which was characteristic of the Roman Catholic Church
before the Reformation. The American lady who was traveling with us was a Roman Catholic
and she was appalled at many of the things that she observed; the absence of a sense of social
responsibility being one of them. I believe that one can not understand Latin America without
keeping in mind the fact that the Roman Church was transplanted there before the Reformation
and that the cleansing effect of that movement did not reach there until the middle of the
twentieth century.
Our next stop was the city of Fortaleza. This is one of the poorest areas of Brazil, located as it is
just about 3 degrees south of the equator. The region is prone to periodic droughts and the only
crop of the area is sugar cane which has been raised there since the Portuguese colonized the area
around the middle of the sixteenth century. Much of the migration to the large cities in recent
years has been from this part of the country. In Fortaleza we saw a sight that has made an
indelible mark in our memories. It is sad and says more about the Brazilian lack of a sense of
social responsibility.
As the ship docked in the harbor, we saw swarms of boys, ages five to fifteen mostly, standing
on the wharf. As soon as the ship was tied up to the dock they jumped into the dirty, filthy, oily
water of the harbor and swam around the ship. The passengers threw rolls, slices of bread and
other articles of food into the water and watched the boys grab these and devour them. These
boys are known as orfaos (pronounced or-founs). They are literally orphans, living pretty much
like stray dogs; sleeping where they can and eating what they can scrounge. They are the
children of women; many of whom are prostitutes. These boys are left to fend for themselves
by the age of five when the mother has another child or two and is not able to care for them.
The girls fare a bit better than the boys. A girl is often adopted by a family which raises her as a
servant maid, usually keeping her until she marries and/or leaves. But the boys are turned out to
fend for themselves and they do so by living in packs, after the style of stray dogs. It is a great
social problem in all of Brazil but is apparently most acute in the drought and poverty stricken
region of the Northeast.
The Princessa Isabella left Fortaleza at 5 o'clock in the afternoon of January 16, 1965 for the
thousand kilometer voyage to Belem (pronounced Bay-LANE) where we arrived at noon on
January 18 which happened to be the birthday of our first son. Much of the route is along, or
close to, the equator. The ocean was so calm that it could have been negotiated safely in a row
boat and we saw fishermen, sometimes a hundred miles from shore, on boats called Jangadas
which are no more seaworthy. One night, while we were still a hundred miles or so from the
mouth of the Amazon, the captain turned out all the lights on the ship except the mandatory red
and green running lights. There was no moon and the view of the sky was breath taking. The
Milky Way stretched across the sky like a blanket of fire reminding me of the poem that I
learned in grade school:
The man in the moon, as he sails in the sky.,
Is a very remarkable skipper.
But he made a mistake, when he tried to take
A drink of milk from the Dipper
dipped it into the Milky Way
And slowly and carefully filled it.
The Big Bear howled and the Little Bear growled
And scared him so that he spilled it.
It is useless to try to describe the sight of the equatorial sky in the complete absence of artificial
light. This experience was certainly one of the most memorable of the entire trip and gave
meaning to the opening line of Psalm 19 which reads (KJV):
"he heavens declare the glory of God
and the firmament sheweth His handiwork."
Surely these words must have been written by some one who had seen the night sky near the
equator unobscured by man's artificial lights and polluted atmosphere. Thelma and I stood on
the foredeck of the ship and looked at the sky and wondered how two country kids from Kansas
ever came to have such an opportunity as this.
The city of Belem is at one of the mouths of the Amazon, about one degree south of the equator.
It is a beautiful city with wide streets that are shaded by mango trees which arch over them.
One of the outstanding features of Belem is its zoo; said to be one of the largest in the world. It
has on display the birds and animals of the tropics, especially the Amazon region. It is a "walk
through" zoo and one is able to actually touch many of the animals. I took a picture of Thelma
while a tapir, large as a big hog, rubbed against her legs. One sight is that of a snake, an
anaconda, which is probably forty feet long, certainly large enough to easily swallow a man.
In Belem we visited a new Catholic Church, quite unlike the old ones that we had seen in
Salvador. This was a modern building such as one that might be seen in a city in the United
States. Inside, however, there was a sign which read (in Portuguese): "Show your education and
your faith. Do not spit on the floor."
The word Belem means "Bethlehem" and since we had not sent any Christmas cards we thought
that it might be a nice thing to send Christmas cards from Bethlehem to the United States. I
went to the Post Office and bought beautiful Air Mail Christmas stamps and we attached them to
a number of Christmas cards addressed to relatives and friends in the United States. To this day
we have never found anyone here who received one of those cards. I did not know then that it
was a common practice for the postal employees in Brazil to steam the stamps off of letters and
sell them again. We soon learned several tricks for use in dealing with the Brazilian postal
system. The first was never to use stamps; always ask that letters be machine stamped and the
second was, if the letter contained important information, to send two or more copies on different
days or from different post offices.
Another observation which we made in Belem was cans of butter and cheese for sale in the
market, plainly marked "A gift of the people of the United States to the people of Brazil." And
on the docks we saw sacks of sugar marked "Product of Cuba." On the same docks we saw
dozens of pieces of equipment for drilling water wells also marked "A gift from the people of the
United States." Quite aside from the obvious fact that the last thing needed in Belem was
equipment for drilling water wells, was the recognition of the wasteful nature of so-called
foreign aid; the amount of drilling equipment rusting away on the dock far exceeding any
amount that the people of Belem could ever use. Knowledgeable Brazilians told me, several
times, that little or none of the aid sent to that country ever reached the people for whom it was
intended. It only enriched the government officials who sent the proceeds from it to their
accounts in England or Switzerland. Without improving the condition of poor people around
the world, foreign aid has added uncounted billions of dollars to our national debt which has now
reached the astronomical number of three trillion dollars.
After spending two days in Belem we began the voyage up the Amazon River to Manaus, a
thousand miles inland. Belem sits at one of the two mouths of the River; the other, and larger
one, is 200 miles farther north, exactly on the equator. Between the two mouths is the island of
Marajo which is half the size of the state of Kansas. The magnitude of the Amazon is
unimaginable; it delivers more fresh water into the ocean than all the other rivers of the world
combined. Its flow of fresh water extends a hundred miles into the Atlantic before becoming
mixed with the salt water of the ocean. The river does not have just a single channel but many
channels depending upon the season of the year when it drains the flood waters from the eastern
slopes of the Andes mountains. From the ship one could never be sure whether the shore line
which we saw was that of the river or that of an island in the river. Some times the ship was so
close to the shore that it seemed that it must touch it. It was an exciting thing to sit on the deck
of an ocean going ship and be able (it seemed) to reach out and grab a handful of leaves from a
tree as the ship passed by. How the captain navigated this large ship through the numerous
winding channels by day and by night without running aground is completely beyond me. I am
certain that he had few navigation aids to help him; one can only admire his skill.
There were a few very small settlements along the shore and the inhabitants were waiting in
small boats for the ship to arrive. I do not know how they learned that our ship was coming but
they evidently had some way of knowing for they were out in their small boats waiting for us to
arrive. The passengers threw candy, bread, and other objects to the people in the small boats
and the children, apparently indifferent to the piranhas (carnivorous fish), dived into the muddy
water to retrieve the packages thrown to them. These people lived in thatched huts built high on
stilts to accommodate the changing level of the river and made their living by harvesting juta
from which is made rope and sacks. They also harvested the Castanha or Brazil nut which
grows on trees which are the highest in the forest. The Brazil nut is the size of a coconut and
one falling from a height of a hundred feet or more can be a deadly missile. Traders in boats
visit these settlements and exchange salt, bacon, beans, rice, etc., for the juta and Castanha. It is
likely that most of the people who live along the banks of the Amazon have never seen a piece of
money; theirs is a purely trading economy.
The only place that could be called a town between Belem and Manaus is Santarem. This town
is located at the junction of the Amazon and the Tapajos Rivers. The Tapajos drains a large
section of the densest rain forest of Central Brazil. The waters of the Tapajos are almost black; I
presume from the decayed organic material that it carries. On the other hand, the water of the
Amazon is a dirty yellow; some say too thick to run and too thin to plow. The clear water of the
Tapajos and the muddy water of the Amazon flow side by side for many miles before becoming
mixed.
We went ashore at Santarem. The water was too shallow for the large ship to approach the
shore so we anchored in the middle of the river. A flotilla of small boats came out and
surrounded the ship, all eager to pick up a few cruzeiros ferrying passengers to the shore. We
discarded caution and descended into one of them and reached the shore safely. Santarem had
no paved street; in fact, it had no actual streets at all. The houses were located more or less at
random with pathways between and among them. Obviously the people were exceedingly poor.
They catered to the tourist trade by selling a kind of black pottery which was made locally but
we saw little else for sale except a few baskets and straw hats. There were a few very old
pick-up trucks but no automobiles and we saw a Roman Catholic priest, clothed in his clerical
garments, riding a small motor scooter. Apparently Santarem exists as a transfer point for ships
plying the two rivers each of which is navigable by large ships for many more miles. In the
upper reaches of the Amazon, the forest is thinner and we saw on distant slopes, farms where
cattle were being raised along side fields that appeared to be planted in corn.
The state of Amazonas is somewhat larger than the state of Texas and, when we were there, had
not a single mile of railroad or highway outside the immediate vicinity of Manaus. Travel was
entirely by ship or by air. We were told that many people in that part of Brazil had never ridden
in an automobile although they had traveled extensively by plane. The city of Manaus, the only
large city on the Amazon above Belem, had a population of about 100,000 people. It sits at the
confluence of the Rio Negro with the Amazon. The city owes its origin to the rubber industry
which prospered there in the early part of the century. In its heyday Manaus had considerable
wealth and with it built an Opera House which rivaled some of those of Europe; in fact, opera
stars came from Europe to perform in Manaus. The rubber was obtained from the rubber trees
that were native to the region but the supply was inadequate to meet the needs of the growing
automobile industry so Henry Ford set up a project to increase the supply. He cleared a large
area in the vicinity of Manaus and planted it in rubber trees. The project was a failure because
the rubber tree grows in the shade of taller trees and without that shade produces little or no
rubber.
With the development of synthetic rubber Manaus declined and was gradually dwindling away.
Little food was ever grown there because the Brazilians did not consider that food could be
produced in the region; "O solo e fraco" (the soil is weak) they would say. After World War II
the Japanese government supported a policy of emigration by subsidizing its citizens for a period
of one year while they became established in another country. Some of these Japanese came to
Brazil and settled in Manaus. They quickly determined that the tropical soil required added
nitrogen so they began to raise chickens. With the droppings of the chickens they fertilized the
soil and soon began to raise fruit and vegetables. Not only did they provide food to supplement
the local diet of fish, bacon, beans and rice; they began to export meat, fruit and vegetables to
Europe. The population of Manaus increased; the Opera House has been refurbished and again
presents programs as it did nearly a century ago. The climate of Manaus is pleasant. Although
it is only 3 degrees south of the equator and the midday sun can be quite warm, the temperature
in Manaus during the entire year varies between about 80 and 90 degrees F. Neither were
insects a problem; I cannot recall seeing a single mosquito during the days we were there.
It is a startling sight to see ocean going freighters and a large passenger ship tied up at docks
which are a thousand miles from the ocean. The normal water level in the river at Manaus is
said to be only 18 feet above that at Belem, a thousand miles down stream. But this can be
misleading because the water level at Manaus varies by as much as fifty feet throughout the year.
To accommodate the changing water level the docks are long bridges, hinged at the shore end
and floating at the other, so that they can rise and fall with the level of the River. Sometimes the
deck of the ship may be below the shore level while at other times it may be above it. It is
difficult to say just how wide the Amazon is at Manaus (or anywhere else) because of the many
islands. But once when I was flying over Manaus in a Boeing 707, I sighted along the edge of
the wing and, with my watch, determined the time it took to cross the river. It took almost a
minute and since the plane flies at a rate of almost 10 miles per minute, the width of the river
must be about 10 miles. And the Amazon is navigable for large ships far above Manaus.
Reluctantly, we left the city of Manaus on the evening of 24 January for the long trip back to
Rio. Only one stop was made on the return trip; at Belem, where supplies were taken on. The
trip around the part of Brazil which reaches out toward Africa, and back to Rio took five days
and nights during which there was little to do except rest, eat, sleep and consider the fantastic trip
that it had been our privilege to make.