374 EXCURSIONS BEYOND EGA. Cuap. XIII 
two, at least, arborescent. I saw here some of the largest trees I had yet 
seen: there was one especially, a cedar, whose colossal trunk towered 
up for more than a hundred feet, straight as an arrow; I never saw its 
crown, which was lost to view, from below, beyond the crowd of lesser 
trees which surrounded it. Birds and monkeys in this glorious forest 
were very abundant; the bear-like Pithecia hirsuta being the most re- 
markable of the monkeys, and the Umbrella Chatterer and Curl-crested 
Toucans amongst the most beautiful of the birds. The Indians and 
half-castes of the village have made their little plantations, and built huts 
for summer residence on the banks of the rivulets, and my rambles 
generally terminated at one or other of these places. The people were 
always cheerful and friendly, and seemed to be glad when I proposed to 
join them at their meals, contributing the contents of my provision-bag 
to the dinner, and squatting down amongst them on the mat. 
The village was formerly a place of more importance than it now is, 
a great number of Indians belonging to the most industrious tribes, 
Shumanas, Passés, and Cambévas, having settled on the site and 
adopted civilised habits, their industry being directed by a few whites 
who seem to have been men of humane views as well as enterprising 
traders. One of these old employers, Senhor Guerreiro, a well-educated 
Paraense, was still trading on the Amazons when I left the country, in 
1859: he told me that forty years previously Fonte Boa was a delightful 
place to live in. The neighbourhood was then well cleared, and almost 
free from mosquitoes, and the Indians were orderly, industrious, and 
happy. What led to the ruin of the settlement was the arrival of 
several Portuguese and Brazilian traders of a low class, who in their 
eagerness for business taught the easy-going Indians all kinds of 
trickery and immorality. ‘They enticed the men and women away 
from their old employers, and thus broke up the large establishments, 
compelling the principals to take their capital to other places. At the 
time of my visit there were few pure-blood Indians at Fonte Boa, and 
no true whites. The inhabitants seemed to be nearly all mamelucos, 
and were a loose-living, rustic, plain-spoken, and ignorant set of people. 
‘There was no priest or schoolmaster within 150 miles, and had not been 
any for many years: the people seemed to be almost without govern- 
ment of any kind, and yet crime and deeds of violence appeared to be 
of very rare occurrence. The principal man of the village, one Senhor 
Justo, was a big, coarse, energetic fellow, sub-delegado of police, and the 
only tradesman who owned a large vessel running directly between 
Fonte Boa and Parad. He had recently built a large house, in the style 
of middle-class dwellings of towns, namely, with brick floors and tiled 
roof, the bricks and tiles having been brought from Para, 1,500 miles 
distant, the nearest place where they are manufactured in surplus. When 
Senhor Justo visited me, he was much struck with the engravings in a 
file of ‘Illustrated London News,” which lay on my table. It was 
impossible to resist his urgent entreaties to let him have some of them 
* to look at,” so one day he carried off a portion of the papers on loan. 
A fortnight afterwards, on going to request him to return them, I found 
the engravings had been cut out, and stuck all over the newly white- 
washed walls of his chamber, many of them upside down. He thought 
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