Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/227

mouth, of the Nile. And no wonder; for the Araguarý region can not be considered an attractive one in any respect, while the relations of the Paraenses with the ontside world are all through the Pará, River, which is the main channel, and the only one used nowadays by vessels visiting the Amazon, whether stopping at Para or going farther up the valley.

M. A. de Belmar tells how ships coming up the Amazon to Pard, avoid the pororóca. Prof. Orton says it rises suddenly along the whole width of the Amazon; while a writer in the Bulletin de la Société' de Géographie (November, 1871) says it is washing away the shore at the Salinas lighthouse, southeast of the mouth of the Pará River. In reply to all this I have only to repeat that the pororóca proper is confined to the northern mouth of the Amazon, in the vicinity of the Rio Araguarý.

It is well known that the tide is felt as far up the Amazon as Obidos. Mr. Belmar has erroneously attributed this to the pororóca. One authority, in describing this phenomenon, represents the waves as breaking upon the rocks. I can say, from personal observation, that there is not a rock to be seen from a short distance below Macapa to near the colony on Araguarý. I can not speak positively of what may be found in the vicinity of Cape North, but I very much doubt there being many rocks exposed there, if any at all.

All that has been written upon this subject by persons having visited the theatre of its action in Brazil is limited to the notes of Condamine on the great pororóca of the Amazon and Araguary,^[1] to those of Bernardino de Souza,^[2] and Dr. Alfred R. Wallace^[3] on the small one of the Rio Guamá. Dr. Marques also gives something regarding its occurrence on the-Rio Mearim, in the province of Maranhão.^[4]

So far as I am able to ascertain, the pororóca itself in its greatest development has never been seen by a white man.

 

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Mr. Woodford, the traveler, says that, although the natives of the Solomon Islands have matches, they still make fire hy friction on certain ceremonial occasions. Their method is to rub a hard piece of wood in a groove formed on a soft piece; but, though the savages would usually produce fire in less than a minute, the traveler himself "rubbed till his elbows and shoulders ached without ever producing more than smoke."

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1. Voyage fait dans l'intérieur de l'Amerique, par M. de la Condamine. Paris, 1745, pp. 193-195.
2. Lembranças e Curiosidades do Valle do Amazonas, pelo Conego Francisco Bernardino de Souza. Pará, 1873, pp. 126, 127.
3. The Amazon and Rio Negro, by Alfred R. Wallace, pp. 114 et seq., where it is spoken of as a "piroróca."
4. Diccionario da Provincia do Maranhão, por Cezar Augusto Marques. Maranhão, 1870, pp. 385, 386.