cue AM A INDIANS 



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walls ; the doors and window-shutters were broken and 

 off their hinges ; the dingy mud-fioors were covered with 

 litter, and the cultivated grounds around the house choked 

 with weeds. The high bank, and with it the settlement, 

 terminates at the mouth of a narrow channel which leads 

 to a large interior lake abounding in fish, manatee, and 

 turtle. 



Beyond Manacapuru all traces of high land cease ; 

 both shores of the river, henceforward for many hundred 

 miles, are flat, except in places where the Tabatinga 

 formation appears in clayey elevations of from twenty to 

 forty feet above the line of highest water. The country 

 is so completely destitute of rocky or gravelly beds that 

 not a pebble is seen during many weeks' journey. Our 

 voyage was now very monotonous. After leaving the 

 last house at Manacapuru we travelled nineteen days 

 without seeing a human habitation, the few settlers being 

 located on the banks of inlets or lakes some distance from 

 the shores of the main river. We met only one vessel 

 during the whole of the time, and this did not come 

 within hail, as it was drifting down in the middle of the 

 current in a broad part of the river two miles from the 

 bank along which we were laboriously warping our course 

 upwards. 



iVfter the first two or three days we fell into a regular 

 way of life aboard. Our crew was composed of ten 

 Indians of the Cucama nation, whose native country is 

 a portion of the borders of the upper river in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Nauta, in Peru. The Cucamas speak the 

 Tupi language, using, however, a harsher accent than is 

 common amongst the semi-civilized Indians from Ega 

 downwards. They are a shrewd, hard-working people, 

 and are the only Indians who willingly and in a body 

 engage themselves to navigate the canoes of traders. 

 The pilot, a steady and faithful fellow named Vicente, 

 told me that he and his companions had now been fifteen 

 months absent from their wives and families, and that on 

 arriving at Ega they intended to take the first chance of 

 a passage to Nauta. There was nothing in the appear- 

 ance of these men to distinguish them from canoe-men in 

 general. Some were tall and well built, others had squat 

 figures with broad shoulders and excessively thick arms 

 and legs. No two of them were at all similar in the shape 

 of the head : Vicente had an oval visage with fine regular 



