For the nuts are well protected by a hard case with two coverings 
or skins, after the manner of the hard and soft husks of a black 
walnut. The outer is bark-like, brown and stippled with gray 
specks, while the inner is hard, woody, very ridged and rough 
and from one-fourth to one-half an inch thick. Through both 
these coverings, at the opposite end to where the fruit was 
attached to its parent, there is a small opening, perhaps a half 
inch across, made by the falling inwards of a structure somewhat 
comparable to a “stopper” that fits a bottle with a neck larger 
at the base than at the top. Through this small opening, a varied 
assortment of cockroaches and other insects enter and clean up 
the debris resulting from structures once necessary to the growth 
of the nuts. And sometimes when one picks up one of these 
fruits, out come a horde of cockroaches of various sizes — I counted 
twenty in one instance— which rush off among the dead leaves as 
though they were commuters making their morning train. 
But the native Brazil nut collector does not wait for nature’s 
method of delivering the nuts. As soon as the fruits have largely 
fallen — January to March or even earlier in some localities — he 
collects them in convenient-sized piles, takes his machete, hacks 
off the top third, empties the nuts into a sack or basket, takes 
them to the river and washes them, dries them for several days, 
and stores them in pile - supported, palm - thatched huts from 
whence they are loaded into a river steamer. 
During the Brazil nut harvest, these steamers go poking their 
prows into all sorts of weird places — little flooded forest alley- 
ways, inlets, small palm-thatched villages that geographers have 
never heard of, or else have long since forgotten— the dark-skinned 
buyers calling from the steamer railing as a house or village is 
approached, “Hay, castahnas ! ” and on a favorable reply, the big 
boat, perhaps already loaded almost to capacity with balls of 
rubber, baskets of farina, and tons and tons of nuts loose in the 
hold, in baskets, or in bags— whistles and swings in. A plank is 
pushed ashore and the half-naked, barefoot natives begin, each 
with a basket on his head, to carry on a few more tons. Palm- 
thatched montaria boats, loaded level to the gunwale, appear here 
and there coming through the dark forest wall as if by magic, and 
add their quota. And this performance continues day after day, 
as one drops down the rivers tributary to the Amazon, through 
the low-lying, forest-flooded Brazil nut country, until finally one 
reaches Manaos — one thousand miles up the Amazon — the metrop- 
olis of the Brazil nut trade. 
Here one meets the ocean steamers, and they too are loading 
Brazil nuts. Great steel barges with sliding iron whaleback 
covers are shoved alongside by puffing tugs, and all through the 
day and often through the night, too, the steam winches clank 
their chains, as they lower and raise their steel buckets to and 
from the barges, filling the hold with nuts. 
Once full, the ocean freighter puts on full steam and with 
open hatches, except in stormy weather, hurries northward, for 
Brazil nuts are a perishable cargo. Often loaded wet, they must 
