262 



TRAVELS ON THE AMAZON. 



greater part of whom deserve no better name than pedlars, only 

 they carry their goods in a canoe instead of upon their backs. 

 As their distaste for agriculture, or perhaps rather their 

 passionate love of trade, allows scarcely any of them to settle, 

 or produce anything for others to trade in, their only resource 

 is in the indigenous inhabitants of the country ; and as these 

 are also very little given to cultivation except to procure the 

 mere necessaries of life, it results that the only articles of 

 commerce are the natural productions of the country, to catch 

 or collect which requires an irregular and wandering life, 

 better suited to an Indian's habits than the settled and continued 

 exertions of agriculture. These products are principally dried 

 fish, and oil from the turtles' eggs and cow-fish, for the inland 

 trade ; and sarsaparilla, piassaba, india-rubber, Brazil-nuts, 

 balsam of capivi, and cacao, for the exports. Though the 

 coffee-plant and sugar-cane grow everywhere almost sponta- 

 neously, yet coffee and sugar have to be imported from other 

 parts of Brazil for home consumption. Beef is everywhere 

 bad, principally because there are no good pastures near the 

 towns where cattle brought from a distance can be fattened, 

 and no one thinks of making them, though it might easily be 

 done. Vegetables are also very scarce and dear, and so are 

 all fruits, except such as the orange and banana, which once 

 planted only require the produce to be gathered when ripe ; 

 fowls in Para are 3^. (^d, each, and sugar as dear as in England. 

 And all this because nobody will make it his business to supply 

 any one of these articles ! There is a kind of gambling ex- 

 citement in trade which outshines all the steady profits of 

 labour, and regular mechanics are constantly leaving their 

 business to get a few goods on credit and wander about the 

 country trading. 



There is, I should think, no country where such a universal 

 and insecure system of credit prevails as here. There is 

 hardly a trader, great or small, in the country, that can be said 

 to have any capital of his own. The merchants in Para, who 

 have foreign correspondents, have goods out on credit ; they 

 sell on credit to the smaller merchants or shopkeepers of Para ; 

 these again supply on credit the negociantes in the country tov/ns. 

 From these last the traders up the different rivers get their 

 supplies also on credit. These traders give small parcels of 

 goods to half-civilised Indians, or to any one who will take 



