middle of the island.[1] On the southern side of the month of the Araguarý was a point of land nearly or quite six miles in length, and covered with vegetation, from young shoots to bushes six metres high. I was told that one year before this was nothing more than a sand-bar, without a sign of vegetation on it. The western end of the island of Porquinhos was once known as Ilha Franco; but the channel that separated it from the Porquinhos has been filled up gradually, and the two islands are now one, though the upper end of it is still known as Franco. The point in the mouth of the Araguarý known as the Ilha dos Veados (Deer Island) was, at the time of my visit, fast being joined to the mainland. A couple of years before, boats navigating the Araguarý passed through the channel on the south side of the island. In 1881 it was no longer navigable, and the Veados was rapidly being made part of the right bank of the river.
Owing to this shifting of material the pilots never know where to find the entrance to the Araguarý River. One week the channel may be two fathoms deep on the north side, and the next it may be in the middle; or it may have disappeared altogether, leaving the river-bed perfectly flat, with only one fathom of water across the whole mouth. The bar was in this last-mentioned condition when I passed over it in 1881. At this time another bar extended eastward from the eastern end of Bailique, while a little farther out was another just south of the same line. The shifting nature of the sand-bars about the mouth of the Araguarý renders it unsafe for vessels drawing more than one fathom to enter this river, except at high tides; but, as high tides and the pororóca come at the same time, only light-draught steamers can enter by waiting well outside the bar until the force of the pororóca is spent.[2]
With the few canoes or small sailing vessels that enter this stream (probably less than half a dozen a year) it is the custom to come down past Bailique with the outgoing tide, and to anchor north of the bar that projects from the southern side of the Araguarý, and there to await the turn of the tide to ascend the latter river. Care is always taken to pass this point when the tides are least perceptible.
- ↑ The plants growing upon this newly formed land are all of one kind. They are called Ciriúba, or Xiriúba, by the inhabitants, and belong to the family Verbenaceæ, genus Avicennia.
- ↑ Probably the only steamers that have entered the Araguarý have been Brazilian menof-war of light draught. But in 1881 there was nothing to take a steamer, however small, into this region; for, although the forests below the falls contain an abundance of rubber trees, and although cacao trees form extensive forests, there was at that time next to no population on the stream, while the malaria and the mosquitoes made it almost impossible to live there—indeed, this region is noted for being the most unhealthful on the lower Amazon. Some rubber is gathered above the falls, but it is carried overland from Porto Grande to the Rio Matapý and thence by canoes to Macapá.
